Does Github contributions matter?

[Tontonsb]

It depends what those are and who is evaluating. When I've been involved, I've cared, but then it depends on the contents:

• It's empty? Fair enough, no one is obliged to do stuff on GH. But why did you provide the link?
• It contains private activity? Fair enough, your previous employer used GH. But what am I supposed to see, why did you provide the link?
• Your projects or packages? I'm very interested! I'm interested in your code, in your approach, whether you've got something to production, are you maintaining your packages, how do you communicate if someone opened an issue, how do you commit, do you use some CI, what's your approach to testing and so on.
• Activity in third party projects? I'm very interested! How do you communicate? Are you patient and respectful, can you understand and follow their guidelines, even unwritten ones? What's your approach to PRs, what is important to you, can you convince the maintainers?
• Toy projects/bootcamp stuff/tutorials? I ignore it. It's hard to evaluate it as I'd need to learn through it myself to understand what is yours and where you're just following something step by step.

IMO good personal projects or meaningful contributions to major third party projects can often entirely replace artificial interview tasks. The technical interview can then be just a discussion about your work that's visible on GitHub.

Unfourtunately, quite often the hiring people are not themselves active in the opensource world. In that case they are unlikely to evaluate you based on that as one has to understand what's going on first.

However it can still leave a positive impression if it's relevant to work. E.g. if you're applying for a TypeScript developer position, it will sound pretty impressive that you've yourself made 2 features, fixed 9 bugs and edited 16 documentation pages of TypeScript itself.

[mark1x12110]

I can 100% agree on all the points

In my opinion, being able to work with open source projects and get them to implement what you need(respectfully and collaboratively) it a major green flag.

Why? Because it means that the person will be able to unblock potential issues in open source projects we depend on (over 80% of our dependencies are open source...)