[Khao]

Is this an April Fools joke? I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak, except for devs who developped clever git repos that make your contribution graph show pixel art (which is pretty awesome).

I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.

[grantcox]

I agree that it's a largely irrelevant / frivolous feature, and if someone cares deeply about it, it's likely a sign of some deeper psychological issue.

But deeper psychological issues are real, and gamification definitely pushes a certain agenda. When that agenda (in this case "streaks" and "commits per day") isn't really serving a community, it would be sensible for the community to tweak those rules. Putting some upper bound on them (for example, no "penalty" for missing days here and there, or stopping counting at some point) makes no difference to people "who don't care about it", but may make a positive difference to those people who care too much about it.

[p4wnc6]

I've had interviewers ask me why I had certain gaps in my contribution graph before. Sometimes from large, successful tech companies that are widely sought after for jobs.

[__jal]

Happened to me, too. I must have lost my poker face at that point, because a couple of questions later the interviewer seemed to have noticed that I had lost interest, and asked why. That was a novel enough experience that I was honest, and just said that (a) winning at GH is of zero interest to me, and (b) a corporate culture that actually cares about that is judging their minions by bullshit metrics, causing all the well-known the problems that come from picking proxy measures that don't measure what you actually care doubt.

And if they actually do care about seven day work-weeks being the norm, that's substantially worse.

(Interview ended shortly after I got a muddy reply about how hard it is to measure developer productivity, so they use the metrics they can find, etc. Textbook example of a drunk looking for their keys under the lamp post, which completely reaffirmed my decision.)

[dsmithatx]

Perhaps it was more of a personality test to see how you would answer and not them caring about gaps. Maybe they were seeing if you would come up with a crazy excuse and get defensive. Just a thought.

Edit - It is interesting without knowing intention people say to pass on the employeer. How many interviewers ask stupid questions not realizing they might miss out on a great hire? I think often companies forget that we are interviewing them as well. At any rate I think it's fair to ask in the interviewer why they are asking the question or what is their concern. Especially if the question already made you decide to turn down any offers.

[quantum_nerd]

Seriously?? is this what tech hiring has turned into? pseudo-reverse psychology and mind tricks. I didn't even know the "green" GH contributions were that important.

[emodendroket]

That seems like a reason to pass on them, to be honest.

[p4wnc6]

I did pass because I'm way too picky about jobs to put up with that. But even so, what if I had been desperate for a job and passing just wasn't an option?

I also mentioned that this was a place that is widely regarded as a great employer. Most engineers would want to work there. It makes it really hard to say that the weird behavior of one recruiter is a good reason to pass, but at the same time, no one should have to put up with having their frequency of open source contribution questioned like that.

[emodendroket]

Oh, no, I don't disagree with you and the culture of celebrating spending every waking hour writing code is harmful. But, also, if someone asked me that and I wasn't totally desperate I would be dropping out of consideration at that point.

[leshow]

This is a really dumb way of thinking about things. If you truly think this person has a mental issue, then tweaking the commit graph on github is not going to do anything about it.

[foota]

I disagree, it seems like enabling someone's unhealthy behavior is something that should be avoided in society. Although perhaps that's a bit of a slippery slope? For instance, some people are alcoholics and we still sell alcohol and I don't view that as wrong. Though we do for instance prohibit overservice. I'd love to hear some other people's opinions.

[leshow]

i think you don't agree with yourself there. anything can be taken by someone the wrong way.

[MBCook]

Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster?

That seems very harsh.

[grantcox]

"Mental illness" and "psychological problems" both have such unfair negative connotations. But yes, if someone is finding the pressure of an activity graph and "breaking a streak" is negatively impacting their work-life balance, I think they likely have a problem.

These problems are quite common, hence the great success of free-to-play, extremely-gamified mobile apps. In many of those cases exploiting the most vulnerable users is the entire point, but not so for Github. So for Github to consider how they can maintain the interesting / fun / motivating (or irrelevant) aspect for most of their users, but temper the positive/negative reinforcements that some people may find literally addictive, it seems quite responsible.

[Smudge]

Zach Holman has an interesting writeup on focusing on maintaining that streak, and how it (among other factors) eventually led to burnout:

https://zachholman.com/posts/streaks/

Personally, I find the contribution chart both motivating and frustrating. The contribution chart is enough of a signal that I try to make sure it looks healthy each week. But, at the same time, it's far from a perfect tool for assessing how productive I am, because commits come in all shapes and sizes. And like any gamified metric, it can lead to unhealthy obsessions.

Arguably anyone who falls for gamification has "a problem," to one degree or another. But if we know that certain personalities are more likely to have unhealthy obsessions with something, that's maybe a good reason to take it down, or at least lessen the focus on the "streak" and represent activity more positively without highlighting the gaps.

[mburns]

Geoff Greer has a great counterpoint to that article (published around the same time):

http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/07/burnout-is-in-the-mind/

[Smudge]

Burnout is the western equivalent of "fan death," really? I don't buy it.

I appreciate the argument that burnout is more like depression, and should be approached with the same mindset. (i.e. simply taking time off of work might not cure it.)

But that's not really a valid counterpoint. One person's ability to have a 2-year Github streak is not evidence that burnout is just "in the mind," as he puts it. It just means that he's found a particularly sustainable balance. In fact, I'd argue that he's kind of an outlier. That 2-year streak would definitely not work for everyone.

What we commonly refer to as "burnout" can also surface with very physical symptoms. Blood pressure spikes, teeth grinding, weight loss or gain, physical exhaustion, even heart attacks. Maybe these symptoms are better attributed to stress or lack of exercise, but when they are a result of overwork and, more specifically, the compulsive need to work at a certain level despite all costs, that's burnout. It's not good and should not be taken lightly.

[KirinDave]

> But yes, if someone is finding the pressure of an activity graph and "breaking a streak" is negatively impacting their work-life balance, I think they likely have a problem.

So your misplaced value judgements, loaded language and dismissals aside... You realize that just because you might not value it, that it isn't being used to value you?

Lots of employers use github activity as a signal for hiring. And so making sure you can demonstrate very active participation in the community is often quite important to getting a job.

Even then, given that overwork seems to be something of an epidemic in the software industry and the entire industry is famously full of signals suggesting that a 60 hour work week is normal and reasonable (hell, somehow they decided that working on saturdays wasn't enough, now people say you need to work 8.5 hours every day to be "normal" and 11 hours a day is "crush")?

The signal and the reward for more work isn't healthy after some point. There is an environment around github that github has to consider.

[Dylan16807]

I don't see a claim that any particular person cares deeply about the commit graph.

[konschubert]

If you are right and nobody cares about it, that's a good reason to remove it. If you are wrong and people care about it, maybe the poster has a point.

Nevertheless, I think there is a point in having a coarse activity indicator in order to assess how likely somebody is going to respond to issues or pull requests.

[Khao]

I don't care about my own contribution graph, but I still find the feature useful when looking at other profiles. It's informative and it even looks nice. I do 95% of my work on Github in private repos at work, and 5% on open source projects, so my contribution graph is pretty abysmal. I don't mind, because it's what I actually do. It represents me in a fair way. It lets others looking at my profile know "hey, this dude does some open source" and I'm fine with that. When looking at other profiles, I'll know if this person is full-time open source or only does some contributions on the side infrequently, or it's an inactive profile. It serves a purpose right now.

[p4wnc6]

Some people would not prefer that this information about them is easily publicly available like that, as I mentioned in my other comment about how this has come up in job interviews in a negative way.

[Khao]

If you contribute open source, your contribution will be out in the open. That's the whole point of it. If you remove it from Github, any website will be able to pull the same info and display it since it's all public information.

[p4wnc6]

But few employers will navigate to a site other than your actual GitHub profile. If a third-party scrapes that data from commit logs, the employer has to trust the third party and also do the extra work of going to their site in addition to your provided profile, and that's far less likely.

Hosting the stats directly on someone's profile landing page at GitHub is incredibly, hugely different and more problematic than if someone else aggregates it later and hosts it elsewhere.

[the_mitsuhiko]

People care a ton about their streaks and I have noted that before. It encourages people to not have weekends.

[mryan]

I feel that week-based streaks could be a good compromise here.

You still have the ability to quickly gauge how active someone is on GH, while allowing people who care about such things to keep a streak running without sacrificing weekend time.

[donatj]

As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)

[vdnkh]

I used to hold a mental backlog of easy commits to keep my streaks going when I was too busy to do real work

[newjersey]

I just gave up and decided to make myself a rockstar with a couple of lines in the command line using /avinassh/rockstar. :)

the way I see it, it validates that I am capable of following simple directions and running a python script :3 that's got to be a valuable asset in an employee, right?

[arien]

Or a little cronjob that commits harmless changes later in the week? :P

I don't care about the contribution streak, but do have friends who comment on theirs on Twitter now and then. I suppose it's just another thing to be proud of...

[kedean]

And then what's the point? You aren't proving anything to the world, and they can trivially see that you didn't do any real work. It's like saying "I'm going to write a part of my novel every day from now on", then every day you type one letter. It's very clearly gaming the system, and for absolutely no gain. You gained no skills, you didn't show yourself to be of value, you don't even get an imaginary reward. The intrinsic reward of tracking systems is lost because deep down you know you didn't do anything.

[arien]

Exactly, I do agree with what you said.

But, this is true whether you commit a few irrelevant lines manually or automatically. So if you're going to do it just for the sake of showing off, at least make it efficient, no? :P

[donatj]

There actually are a handful of tools that let you cheat including one that lets you write text onto the chart.

[leshow]

so care less about it. it's a fucking graph

[sotojuan]

What do you mean it encourages people to not have weekends? Spending 20 mins fixing a small bug or improving docs in your for-fun project isn't giving up your weekend.

[emodendroket]

The "weekend" people mean here is a period of time when you do not do work at all

[cyphar]

Is it uncommon to do some free software work in your spare time? I usually have a bunch of things I want to fix and spend an hour or two during the weekend when I would normally be just watching YouTube.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> Is it uncommon to do some free software work in your spare time?

No. But life for many people consists of more things than just software development.

[sotojuan]

Yeah but... how does GitHub streak encourage people who don't want to do open source/for fun projects to do it?

Seems like it only encourages people who want to do programming outside of work.

We've already concluded that no one cares about your streak except yourself.

[Symbiote]

If it's "work work" (tasks you're being employed to do) then it's illegal in most of the EU to work every day — see the Working Time Directive¹, which requires at least 24 hours of non-work time every week, for most occupations.

I'm paid to work on free software. In the last year, my Github profile shows a single commit on a weekend, when I made a pull request on a browser extension I use. I'd rather spend my weekend time away from computers :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive

[salvadors]

It's illegal for your employer to require you to work. That's not quite the same thing.

[emodendroket]

"Free time" is when you do it, sure. The point is that you are not a machine and probably should not be working on code every single day.

[wyldfire]

I did think it was an April Fools joke at first. (Oh, how we've all been trained).

But I got to thinking about the recent paper that was done analyzing contributions to repos on github [1] and thought that of that actual 10% of active users, there might be some with unhealthy tendencies.

I don't think that the contribution graph should be removed but I can see how it would be a net-negative to someone with those unhealthy tendencies.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431

[emodendroket]

Why does this site, and Github, and StackOverflow, among others, all feature a points/reputation system? After all, they're all meaningless; you can't go cash them in somewhere. And yet it still affects user behavior.

[hk__2]

You can’t cash personal satisfaction; that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. The reputation system feeds you with rewards so you continue.

[emodendroket]

Yes. I agree.

[vivekian2]

But its a real thing - both peer pressure and the pressure of your own expectations.

So the post is definitely worth pondering over and not to be discarded.

I have reviewed multiple intern resumes in the past year and for sure anyone having a solid contribution graph on github would only have stepped up in the shortlist.

So to be dismissive about this issue is just not right.

[hobs]

Reading the first sentence, this is definitely an april fools joke.

[Khao]

I genuinely can't tell.

[BinaryIdiot]

> I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak[...]I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.

Interesting deduction but it's extremely anecdotal and ultimately false. If history has taught us anything it's that people want to control their appearance to others. If there are rockstar developers with a huge contribution graph then people will start to associate that as a pattern to being a rockstar at which point it becomes a goal for people to shoot for.

Yes people shouldn't care. But they do. It's simply how the human mind works. While you say you don't care and you probably don't, I wouldn't be surprised if you cared even if it was just a very, very tiny bit even subconsciously.

This affects users of all social networks. People even develop eating disorders because they're worried about negative social evaluations[1].

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/

[hinkley]

There are people out there who judge you on your contribution consistency. Some of those people are involved in the hiring process.

In the interview process, we tend to worry about what we telegraph, and we should really spend more time worrying about what the other guy is telegraphing. For some of us it's hard to remember that anybody who thinks committing 7 days a week means you're a better person... isn't someone you want to hang around with anyway.

Rejection stings, even though being rejected by someone you objectively can't respect shouldn't hurt that much. We are human. If you prick us we bleed.

[ronnier]

I saw people talk about it at Amazon (internally there's the exact same concept as github's contribution graph)

[jcoffland]

GitHub is totally over thinking this. I barely notice the social networking aspects of GH.