The dude hires people for programming positions and a lot of people use their GitHub as a portfolio, basically. He was saying that if you don’t have that, you’re basically not even considered for the job.
In summary, this specific case was about it being basically a requirement to program 24/7. Which is pretty toxic.
You do realize that the ifixit solderimg iron also has firmware and that you need to connect it to a computer or their very expensive battery pack to adjust its settings, right?