Also, is it me, or is this ridiculous? Accountants don't need to do any open-source accounting to prove their bona fides. Lawyers don't need to side-hustle some public defense cases to get respect. Civil Engineers don't build some free bridges to get hired.
The employer working out if I have the technical skills I say I have is literally not my problem. They need to have a technical test or whatever they feel ticks that box for them. I'm happy to jump through whatever hoops they put in front of me (except a "take-home project" that will actually take more than an hour), but they have to put the hoops out.
I'm not against open source, but I don't see that as a qualification either. It's a different thing from writing commercial code, with different skills and conditions. Plus, 90% of "projects" that I see on people's Git*b repos are forks or non-working code. I'm all for having my mistakes in public, but if I was to judge the average coder by their Git*b content I'd never hire any of them.
Same for blogging - the ability to write a coherent, meaningful blog is great, and possibly a useful indication that the author can actually string a sentence together, but it's a different skill from what's required to write commercial code.
