It's pretty clear that requiring a Github history is discriminatory. I wonder, though:
(1) Are there any companies which literally remove a person's resume from the running if his/her fit seems to be good in other ways, just because they do not have a public facing github repo? Or is this just something that people are talking about but not actually implementing.
(2) In what sense is any job requirement not discriminatory? Requiring 5 years of Ruby experience discriminates against those with only 6 months of Ruby experience. Requiring a Masters degree discriminates against those with a Bachelors or no degree. Making the candidate do a programming test discriminates against people who don't perform well on tests. The question is whether the programmers that a company hires based on a Github criterion are measurably "better" than those hired using different criteria. As far as I know, no such comparison has been done.
I could absolutely see myself using this as a screening mechanism. When I was hiring developers, I would get literally hundreds of resumes sent to me. Filtering through resumes is a waste of time. You cannot tell from that piece of paper (PDF, Word Doc, etc) how technically capable a person is, or if they would be a good fit for the team.
I do not have time to interview hundreds of people, so we have to apply some filtering. Are we going to potentially filter out a good candidate because they didn't take the time to make themselves stand out? Maybe, but I'm okay with that.
Good point. If you have to go through hundreds, then you're more or less looking for a reason to say no. Better that you miss the odd good candidate, than waste weeks of productive time trying to make the process 100% perfect.
(1) Are there any companies which literally remove a person's resume from the running if his/her fit seems to be good in other ways, just because they do not have a public facing github repo? Or is this just something that people are talking about but not actually implementing.
(2) In what sense is any job requirement not discriminatory? Requiring 5 years of Ruby experience discriminates against those with only 6 months of Ruby experience. Requiring a Masters degree discriminates against those with a Bachelors or no degree. Making the candidate do a programming test discriminates against people who don't perform well on tests. The question is whether the programmers that a company hires based on a Github criterion are measurably "better" than those hired using different criteria. As far as I know, no such comparison has been done.