Well he did say that it would reject a fairly high amount of good candidates, but, given your attitude, I'd say it would get this one right.

Not sure why you've latched onto GitHub, he said it could be any one of the four. The principle is obviously just about demonstrating work that you've actually done. I'm pretty sure that's reasonable and not cause to go off on hipsters. Yes, there would be some qualified candidates that would not be able to show those things for various reasons, and that is probably the reason for the high estimate of false negatives, but presumably the decision-makers would be permitted to use common sense to make exceptions.

I personally know many people who have similar profile as you. They are all very smart and absolutely worth interviewing but when you are designing a probabilistic system to classify something at scale (think 1000+ resumes flowing in every week), things needs to be automated, fast and there are going to be false negatives. You should always make data driven decision for your scenario, for example, collect resumes of all people who are working out great for your company and extract patterns from their resumes.

However there is another more stronger counterpoint that I've argued with people around me. As developera pretty much all of us have used StackOverflow to get answers, used someone's blog to learn something or looked in to GitHub repo for some code. It just feels natural and ethically responsible to me that we also return back something to the community from which we consuming so much. People who are sweating out these content without any expectations of financial gains or even fame are obviously sacrificing their free time to help others. Why can't you return the favor? The lack of any evidence of your contribution to community may not reflect deficiency in your skill set but it does put a question mark on self-initiatives that you might take in your job or your willingness to help your colleagues even if it doesn't benefit you or your drive to make others become better from your learnings. After certain stage in career, skill sets are given and what matters is your ability to multiply your impact by leveraging and empowering others. Your participation and contributions to community are good indicators in this area, however false negatives and edge cases always exists.

So you're saying that the people who spend their free time developing projects that you most probably use in some form or another are doing “stupid shit”. I wouldn't hire you either.

No, I mean stupid shit for people that think looking at a GitHub page is all they need to know about a developer. I'm happy folks work on Open Source software and Github has helped a lot of these projects with visibility and infrastructure, but as the gp basically stated: "you either have a web presence or we don't interview you", then yeah, I don't care about that and having been on the interviewing side a lot, 95% of the github links in resumes (and yes, I check them) are crap and I can honestly said, done so they would have something to show and not because it had any real value (sorta like the 4043th JS framework, you do it because it brings you a bit of status, not because you are actually solving a problem or improving on a solution)

true that, no one has time to sit there all day and answer questions on StackOverflow to get a top rating. The checklist is a best way to weed out so many great developers.