alt Hacker NewsThe converse is actually a negative signal for me. If you list a GitHub profile on your resume, but that GitHub profile is a ghost town consisting exclusively of "test repo please ignore" and "freshman-year assignments I was required to fork from professor's repo," that tells me you don't have an above-average understanding of why you add something to your resume.
If you don't have an impressive GitHub profile, that's fine. To your point - the absence of it is not a penalty, and the presence of a good one is a very positive signal. But the presence of one that turns out to be a dud is a negative.
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It partly depends on the level I'm hiring for. A junior candidate with a GitHub profile full of obvious tutorial projects still helps me skip putting them through FizzBuzz. A senior candidate with a ghost town could reflect poorly on them.
I wouldn't consider a GitHub full of "tutorial apps" as a red flag because it's very easy to underestimate the work behind a project when looking at it from an outsider's perspective.
This is especially true for code that was voluntarily written in someone's free time. For example, each work day is made of 8 hours 5 days a week, but a "hobby day" is more like 3 hours every other weekend. So I would consider one or two features per year to be a pretty productive pace for a volunteer, free time project. Or, worst case scenario, I would just be neutral about it and ignore those projects.