One unintended consequence of this advice being widely followed will be a lot of (or, frankly, "even more") write-only projects appearing on Github. As an interviewer I wouldn't be against this metric, but I would prefer to see that it wasn't too obviously gamed. You'd hope that the public creativity was pursued for intrinsic reasons (interest in the topic) rather than extrinsic.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't get hired if they don't have some huge repo that everyone loves, just that this shouldn't turn into some new thing for people to desperately grind.
At the very lowest level, I'd expect to see a lot of plagiarism and projects that are barely competent rewrites of someone else's work. I often go searching for various exotic keywords and often see fragments of things that I've worked on "written up" in almost entirely content-free blog posts; more likely to attract clicks rather than interviewer attention, but still.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't get hired if they don't have some huge repo that everyone loves, just that this shouldn't turn into some new thing for people to desperately grind.
At the very lowest level, I'd expect to see a lot of plagiarism and projects that are barely competent rewrites of someone else's work. I often go searching for various exotic keywords and often see fragments of things that I've worked on "written up" in almost entirely content-free blog posts; more likely to attract clicks rather than interviewer attention, but still.