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by dsmithatx 3734 days ago
My response on Github:

I haven't made my first commit to a public Github however, it seems to me you can easily keep your streak with minimal effort. Why not just stash a small commit during the week and have a cronjob commit it for you on Saturday and another Sunday?
1 comments
phasmantistes 3734 days ago
Because now you're gaming the system. If the incentives put in place by the system are so perverse that the best advice is to -- for lack of a better word -- "cheat", then the incentives need to be changed.
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dsmithatx 3734 days ago
But if there is no tangible reward are you gaming the system? Isn't this really just about someone wanting to get a "streak" to satisfy their own inner desire or are they cheating at some game I'm not really aware of? I'm not saying you should cheat just saying spread your work out to make a graph pretty.

Maybe you code 18 hours M-F. Is a guy who codes 5 minutes 7 days a week cheating because he gets a streak and you don't? Whose to decide if he is gaming the system by barely contributing.

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phasmantistes 3734 days ago
There are actually tangible rewards: multiple people in this thread have talked about how they've had discussions with recruiters who examined their activity history and commit streaks. So maybe having longer streaks helps you get a job, and maybe having shorter ones hurts. It's anecdotal, yes, but it's not intangible.

But I think your second paragraph addresses the real problem: contributing 18hrs/weekday and contributing 5mins/day are both legitimate open source contribution styles. But the "streaks" metric removes all subtlety -- how many contributions are they actually making; are the changes meaty or trivial; do the changes break CI; do the changes address Issues in their respective repos -- and so I don't believe it is a helpful metric to display.

Personally, I believe it does more harm that good, by encouraging people to maintain streaks even if doing so actually decreases their true productivity or happiness. But no matter how much or how little harm it does, I think it is hard to argue that it does much good, since it is such a high-level distillation of complex information.

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