As someone who has been in charge of recruiting developers, one of the hardest parts is deciding if someone is really any good. Your CV and who you’ve worked for doesn’t really say anything, even after chatting to you I don’t know whether the code you are writing is going to be good or not.

So I can either get you to do a coding excercise (but who has time for that, especially when you may have three other offers already) or I can ask for a sample of your code. When I ask candidates if they have a GitHub profile, I ask because that’s where most people have samples of code they’ve worked on. If you don’t, just tell me and send me a zip of some code so I can see how you actually write code.

If you don’t even have that, well sorry, but I’m getting plenty of CVs through everyday.

It also works the other way, maybe you aren’t good at interviews but you know you are a good developer. List on your CV some of your interesting projects with GitHub links (or put “code available on request”).