Agreed! The last few that interviewed me noticed I had a Github account and perused the projects just barely afaik- not enough to ask questions about any of it.
Github and any other open source repository you link to are a badge of "I did open source development". What the first page in Github, etc. looks like in that first 0.15 of a second of the 5-10 seconds they spend looking at it may be on average only 2% importance to the hiring decision.
Do NOT stop doing what you want to do or start paring projects down just for looks. Sure maybe it will help, but don't sacrifice your work and what you've done just to look GQ in an attempt to get a job. Instead, try to work on what you do have and make it better.
Spoken like a young entrepreneur gone academic. You will be a semi-interesting success as a difficult teacher and after your long traipse through life as a researcher, you'll make a great unhappy VP in the IT department of a large ivy-league university one day. Congratulations, and thank you for the advice. I am humbled, and even more resolved to stop being a developer one day.
Everything you wrote was right on, with the exception of the no writing on the whiteboard. That is just nonsense. You could have more quickly relayed the same code on a whiteboard and the interviewer wouldn't have had to have provided a post-it. You're lucky you got the offer after that kind of stunt, and it labels you as "eccentric". Not in a good way.
The age old idea of "do one thing and do it well" certainly works, and it makes sense to hire experts rather than jack-of-all-trades if you can afford it. My team has tried and failed to be a team of generalists in an environment that is very silo'd with a lot of politics and a lot of undirected and uncontrolled customers. Experts counter-intuitively are better to have than generalists in this situation, because experts would have to collaborate and communicate to get the job done; in a team of generalists where each works in a silo, no one has reason to talk with each other unless forced, and this is dangerous if one were to leave, as there would be little familiarity with the application they developed by the rest of the team.
But, on the other hand, this post was about startups. In a startup, it makes more sense to hire good generalists, or to hire someone that is good at one thing, but learns the others. The reasons for this are (1) startups usually lack funds to hire three experts vs. one generalist, (2) fault-tolerance: if you hire two generalists and one leaves, you still have someone that can run development.
Github and any other open source repository you link to are a badge of "I did open source development". What the first page in Github, etc. looks like in that first 0.15 of a second of the 5-10 seconds they spend looking at it may be on average only 2% importance to the hiring decision.
Do NOT stop doing what you want to do or start paring projects down just for looks. Sure maybe it will help, but don't sacrifice your work and what you've done just to look GQ in an attempt to get a job. Instead, try to work on what you do have and make it better.