Let's look at that chair analogy, you are presuming that someone can look at a finished chair and say it's a good chair, and the carpenter who built it is proba

Let's look at that chair analogy, you are presuming that someone can look at a finished chair and say it's a good chair, and the carpenter who built it is probably good. But in order to do that evaluation, you need to spend time examining the chair. And you don't have any guarantee that the chair was actually made by the person presenting it to you. Maybe someone else helped them build it, or they built it using step by step instructions they found online. My issue is that the evaluation can take a lot of time, and if you are not familiar with the project, it makes it really difficult to get anything useful. If your hiring process always requires github code, then the chance of people faking it, or presenting code that isn't theirs is going to increase. And if you are looking at it for a project a candidate can discuss, you can do the same thing by choosing something from their resume. In my opinion, it just doesn't add that much and will wind up taking up a lot of time. You would also need to decide when in the process you look at the projects. Doing a proper eval would still likely take hours for a small handful of candidates, so you wouldn't want to do it until a person was well down the interview path. And at that point is it really adding much more than you already know?