A few years ago I remember being asked to sit in on an interview with a senior-level developer. Our lead seemed really impressed by this guy, and he had a ton o

A few years ago I remember being asked to sit in on an interview with a senior-level developer. Our lead seemed really impressed by this guy, and he had a ton of specific questions written out on various tools, which was fairly strange as we tried to make it a fairly light process. She said that it was an opportunity to ask a core developer of a lot of open source projects some questions. After looking at his GitHub profile a few minutes before he arrived, it turns out that she believed that all the forks on his account meant that he was an active contributor, when in reality this guy was using forks to save repos he found interesting. In all fairness to my boss, this guy tried to lead us down that road, since he had contributed a typo fix to a README file a few months ago, and used this as a way to say he was an open-source contributor. Strictly speaking, he is, but there's a big difference in what he's done and what my boss thought he had done. Given that many developers don't really deal with GitHub all that much, outside of as a link to documentation for hosted code, it wouldn't surprise me if some hiring managers had hired people based on what they've forked, rather than actually checking to see if they've written any code on the account, or whether it's any good.