We don't ignore them completely, we just weight them very, very low, as I've indicated. They do provide context. Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs, I suspect. We'll likely just agree that we weight things differently and are willing to forego
some otherwisee excellent candidates to index more heavily on being fair to everyone in the process and judging them to the same standards. This is a conscious choice, and so far a very good one.
To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source. (Maybe if I had worked side by side with the person in a previous life would be weighted) Even if we did use that as a proxy, it doesn't really save time because people would have to inspect the work and still doesn't really tell me anything about the candidates approach to problem solving or framing of issues that I can get from pair programming or walking through some code for an hour.
I applaud all your open source contributions and appreciate them, but I wouldn't consider them in whether to hire you except perhaps at the margins. Others may disagree and that's their conscious choice or they're indexing on something different.
To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source. (Maybe if I had worked side by side with the person in a previous life would be weighted) Even if we did use that as a proxy, it doesn't really save time because people would have to inspect the work and still doesn't really tell me anything about the candidates approach to problem solving or framing of issues that I can get from pair programming or walking through some code for an hour.
I applaud all your open source contributions and appreciate them, but I wouldn't consider them in whether to hire you except perhaps at the margins. Others may disagree and that's their conscious choice or they're indexing on something different.