[random_visitor]

Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't.

This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week".

I guess this was bound to happen since hacktoberfest and similar programs have become so popular. Part of me is sad that some influencer is so careless and rallied 20 something enthusiastic kids to do this and adding another bad incident Indians will be remembered for.

Edit: I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile. When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. It's just so much of a convoluted mess, that even the capable students distance themselves from it (convoluted, as in these capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now. And the one club head is a former part of these guys who really hasn't improved in the 2 years after that). Much of this bad guidance contributes to that statistics you see on how "90% of Indian coders are unqualified"

Edit 2: (just dropping my reply down the thread from) Someone mentioned that I shouldn't drag other Indians into this. I guess that was bad judgement on my part as it doesn't really matter here, I apologise it I came off as disrespectful to fellow South Asian demographic, that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to bring attention to an underlying issue. We have a lot of bad rep for filling sites like Quora and Medium with loads of low effort content, sending unsolicited messages on LinkedIn and AngelList, and in general bad etiquette in messaging others over the internet. Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populace), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people on how to conduct written communication and how to behave in casual to semi-formal settings in the internet.

[saagarjha]

I can understand Hindi well enough to skim the video, which I just did. The impression I got was that this person was an enthusiastic YouTuber with somewhat good intentions: “get free swag”, “learn how to open a pull request which you’ll need to know how to do”, “if your pull request is garbage it’ll get rejected and you won’t get credit”. The issue was that he picked some random repository and made a useless change for sake of demonstration-I assume to make it fit in the video, but this basically set the example for everyone watching it. So unintentionally he’s taught a bunch of people who are really motivated in getting this free shirt and also maybe learning how to get into open source (not necessarily the wrong audience, but maybe a bit wet behind the ears) to spam projects. And there is nobody to guide these people but this video. I think the outcome is obvious in retrospect, but I forgive this dude for making this video although I would very much like him to make a follow up where he shows how it’s really done.

There is a general problem (everywhere, but particularly in India where there are a lot of people but very little guidance) of eager people who are willing to participate in programs that get them interested in software development and open source and coding. And I think that’s really great. The issue is that providing people with free swag and walking away is really just pretending to help, rather than actually doing work to help.

[mcv]

As far as I can tell his video only did damage: it taught people to spam open source projects, created a lot of bad blood, probably made open source maintainers more suspicious of new contributors, and gave a large number of potential contributors a bad experience.

It could have been so much better if he'd actually put in the effort to create a real, meaningful pull request. Show how to clone the project, run it, fix a bug, write a test for the fix, and then submit the pull request. That would have put a lot of people on the right path.

But it's much easier and quicker to just do a quick, meaningless change, and as a result give a really bad example.

[srtjstjsj]

Even worse, since he's speaking Hindi, his campaign rallied Indians into a massive cloud of bad behavior and made thousands of GitHub community members a little more prejudices against Indians in the future. Even if he meant well and didn't profit at all, he hurt the people he tried to help

[saagarjha]

I entirely understand why this change was picked and will maintain it was a bad choice. However, I don’t think I can fault them for doing that when the alternative would take significantly more time and effort and detract from the point they were trying to make, which is the steps necessary to make a pull request and not the expected content of one. Given the results, however, I would very much appreciate it if the author of the first video made another one which filled in the gaps of their first one.

[tremon]

I don’t think I can fault them for doing that when the alternative would take significantly more time and effort

Isn't that basically the definition of spam: "but making something useful would take significantly more time and effort"?

[saagarjha]

Well, I'm considering it in the context of a YouTube video, where there's a length limit and such. Usually you get around this by actually doing the work beforehand and swapping it out, or doing something simple and then saying that this isn't actually representative which is easier and doesn't require a cut but can lead to the issue we see here. Again, I can't fault them for choosing to do this, but I can still say it ended up being a poor choice.

[mcv]

He still could have prepared a legitimate pull request in advance. It was a terrible example, and the more I read about it, the more I think it was intentional and never had the intention to help Open Source projects in any way.

[saagarjha]

He could (and should) have, but I do not think that he intentionally tried to hurt open source projects.

[ratww]

Yep. Most spam PRs were on website repositories, which is exactly what he used as an example in the video.

I don't know Hindi, but since it's a "free swag" video I assume some people with limited or none technical knowledge also saw it. There's a big chance people are just following it without knowing the consequences of their actions.

[andi999]

I am curious, when you say there is very little guidance what do you mean? To me in some european states there is zero guidance in IT, or what exactly do you mean.

[saagarjha]

Well, I’m not saying that Indians are the only people without guidance in this area; it’s just that India in general has it relatively bad. This video was in Hindi-the amount of material actually telling you how to file a good pull request in that language (as opposed to English) is comparatively much lower. In the United States I mostly figured this out by looking at other pull requests, and schools are beginning to teach it as well, but for many in India this video is the best they know of.

[imheretolearn]

I literally came here to say this. The first thought I had by looking at the screenshot of the PR(without watching the video) and reading the highlighted comment was that "This guy must be an Indian". I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but after watching the video, I was appalled by what I was hearing. And the worst part is, that he says you will learn how to make a PR. Sorry, but no, you will not learn how to make a genuine PR by watching the video. Another thought that I had was, how many kids are getting into software development because of the "swag" and how many of them are genuinely interested in understanding the intricacies involved in building good software.

Disclaimer: I am an Indian

[AmIDev]

If you go through some of his other videos, it seems he gains viewers by making clickbait-ish videos. One of videos says "Learn python in 1 video". The video is about 2 hours long.

[higerordermap]

> capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now.

I am also an Indian student and can confirm this is very true.

There are so many people posting 20 line tensorflow 'projects', often copied code, for the "swag" of it.

Even competitive coding is gamed a lot. You can't judge people on competitive coding profiles.

> Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populance), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour.

This is mostly better attributed to the rat race mentality that is so common among Indians. Everything wrong with education in India stems from this. The rote learning based education, high competition for entering CS degrees despite lack of interest, low quality work in indian outsourcing firms, and company politics to become manager ASAP.

[tomc1985]

> CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him

I say, cancel him. And all his fans. CC's think they're hot shit because they can produce a video and upload it to youtube, forgetting entirely that it is the content of the video that gives it any worth. We hate on moronic Medium posts idiotic PR releases, and other low-effort media, why should this be any different? If he deputizes his audience to be assholes he should pay for it.

Stop letting ignorance be an excuse with these folks.

[raxxorrax]

Disagree. It is a problem with hype and code being more centralized. Yes, an annoying for many, but to say this ruined anything is probably exaggerated.

[fastball]

I mean, you could fairly objectively make the judgement that this one video had a net-negative impact on the productivity of humanity.

[gspr]

> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice.

I think this gives the spammers too easy an out.

They're adults who live in a society. They know full well that spamming is not OK, either offline or online. They also know that what they're doing is spamming, not accidentally overly fervent contributions.

Don't cut them any slack. This is pure and simple vandalism with a profit motive.

[amitheonlyone]

The thing is they may not. For all we know, they're hearing about pull requests the first time and just seeing the presenter showing how easy it is to do, by altering/adding a few words, and get a free t-shirt. I think the blame is all on the channel. The least he could've made a proper pull request by fixing an issue. That said, the blame should also go on DO since they could've made hacktoberfest opt-in. Instead they encourage PRs on any public repo.

[mcv]

Plenty of blame for both. The channel is appealing to people to spam crap PRs to inactive projects for the sole purpose of winning some swag, and his followers go spam projects for the sole purpose of winning swag.

One guy encourages people to be assholes, and the people respond by acting like assholes. Both leader and followers are wrong in this case.

[gspr]

Very good point. I certainly did not want to give the guy who encouraged them a break.

[raxxorrax]

You alone are not a spammer. You would need to anticipate the behavior of others. That there are 4 or 5 people on the internet is something that is slowly learned.

[saagarjha]

They live in a society that is not your society. I think it is entirely possible, and anecdotally even likely, that they do not realize what they are doing.

[CGamesPlay]

> I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week

Is this true? I don’t speak Hindi but this is exactly opposite to what the pull quotes on the original article say that he said.

[random_visitor]

He did, his statements (translated to English) were:

-"Don't send PR to popular repos, they'll mark it as spam"

-"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out of 20 is doable"

-"Hacktoberfest has had seasons when they didn't get enough participants and had leftover merch. I request every single one of you to go grab one"

The thumbnail can be translated to "Big Co. distributing free t-shirts, go grab 'em"

Also, his previous pinned comment asked people to tell him about swag-grabbing tactics from other events so he can make another video on it (There was a comment where he was enquiring a guy on how to get Azure merch). His entire video was appalling to go through.

[belorn]

Is "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week"

The same translation of:

"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out 20 is doable"

It is times like this that a third translation would be nice, preferable with a bit more context around the "4 out 20" quote.

[random_visitor]

"4 out of 20" was directly mentioned by him, stating that a it's unlikely that you open 20 PR to random repos and every one of them is marked spam in next 7 days.

> I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs

This is the translation of his long winded explanation rationalizing on how "Improved docs" PR which adds "Awesome project" to docs is actually an improvement, and the PR is just asking the owner to incorporate these "improvements" to his codebase. Spam wasn't directly worded (I don't remember there being a hindi word for that), but he explicitly mentioned to write random crap in the docs and post it to repos they find on page 100 of repo search, so I guess that's a plausible enough to be translated as "spam".

[belorn]

Is there any translated transcription of the video? It seems established that "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs" is not an translated quote but rather an interpretation of the underlying meaning. That is good and all but I would prefer seeing the original source myself, and since it is in a different language, an translation that is as close to the original as possible.

The translation I am most interested in is the 1 minute before and after the "4 out of 20".

[cyphar]

Languages aren't mathematics, you can't losslessly translate between them. All translations are at least to some degree "an interpretation of the underlying meaning".

As someone who was raised bilingual, I always struggle when asked to translate a specific phrase between languages because literal translations are often less useful or accurate than the "interpreted" translation. I would be very suspicious of anyone who claims they have translated something someone else said without changing its meaning at all.

[mcv]

It's also bad from Hacktoberfest that they reward unmerged PRs. It would be better if they only rewarded PRs that are actually accepted or at least do something meaningful.

[detaro]

I worry the spammy set would then turn into a competition on how to harass maintainers to "merge my PR really quickly please please please!", but maybe.

[jfk13]

I've already seen (and dismissed) almost exactly that wording.

[srtjstjsj]

If the DO team weren't completely self-serving anti-socials, they'd have set it up to spend 5 seconds eyeballing each PR before sending out a t-shirt, and warning people that only good PRs would count, and giving a few examples from past years.

Or just direct newbies to a bunch of volunteer/sample repos dedicated to helping newbies learn the system, and maybe offer a competitive higher tier of prizes for PRs nominated by repo owned and chosen by DO.

[wdb]

Ah that’s why my 10 year old dormant repository got multiple PRs yesterday

[olodus]

I would say he probably should have shown that many repos have a todo or even suggested starter issues that one could look at instead of just making some unnecessary change for no reason.

[908B64B197]

> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile

In my mind the problem lies with the college, they should be teaching their students how to contribute meaningfully. Spamming behaviors will only hurt the reputations of everyone from that college.

[bdhess]

I don’t know why the protagonist being Indian is something that would be strongly remembered. I’d guess anyone whose audience has more time than money could’ve hatched a scheme like this, regardless of nationality.

[random_visitor]

I mentioned this because I've seen people bash Indians for ruining sites like Quora and Medium with lot of bad quality content. Spam job offers, freelancing sites with bloated profiles, sending unsolicited messages and resume to people in LinkedIn and AngelList. Much of this comes from us having 1/6 of world's population, but that doesn't excuse a big group from their misdeeds. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people about etiquette in written communication and how to behave in semi-formal to casual internet settings

[MikeTheGreat]

I'm almost afraid to ask this, so please assume good intent and bear with me - I promise this is a genuine question :)

Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.

I wonder if that's a factor the behavior you observed - if there's a cultural pressure to assertively put themselves out there and actively look for jobs in these ways.

So with that said - I'm interested in other people's takes and happy to accept constructive criticism :)

[random_visitor]

> if there's a cultural pressure to assertively put themselves out there and actively look for jobs in these ways.

I am a student so my world-view is highly myopic. That said, in my personal experience, there is a pressure among engineers to stand out, else they won't get a good job. Also there's a rat race mentality inculcated by our parents to excel and always one-up others, rather than to co-operate and collaborate. It was okay when we were school-students and had to contest for entrance into a renowned college. But, the "I was the topper in high school, I gotta excel in adult life, be it through hook or by crook" mentality still runs in college and (hearing from seniors and relatives) in jobs. People are eager to do the 4 hour course on Tensorflow and mention "Tensorflow expert" in their resume to get an edge, people will and do write "Hacktoberfest 2018 and 2019" in their resume, a guy who can fire up an EC2 instance will call himself "moderately proficient in AWS". I'm not joking about these, job-hunting season is starting and I've seen resume of other students mention all this. People see videos of conferences where engineers wear swag t-shirts, and associate swag with good developers, that was further intensified by this guy's video and people wanted this swag for all these reasons.

I guess I've gone slightly OT here, so I'll summarise: Herd mentality due to poor guidance, peer pressure among engineers and the societal pressure to stand out (for securing jobs) is a big culprit here

[bonestamp2]

> I'm not joking about these, job-hunting season is starting and I've seen resume of other students mention all this.

Be very careful with this. At a company I used to work for, the hiring managers started to have a negative view of Indians as they became known for their inflated resumes.

[mcv]

A year ago I was required to hire two developers from TCS. One pattern I noticed is that a lot of developers from TCS, when they don't know the answer to a question, just answer a different question. Another Indian that I did hire, explained that this is a product from Indian culture where not knowing something is seen as a weakness, so people don't want to admit they don't know something, and hide it by answering something else and hoping for the best. I really strongly prefer developers who know and are honest about their limitations. Nobody knows everything, so it's fine if you say you don't know. That makes it a learning opportunity. That opportunity gets closed off when you pretend to know something you don't.

This makes it really hard to hire people from TCS. I did eventually find two good ones, fortunately.

[vijayr02]

For more background on this, if you have the time, watch this movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots

[searchableguy]

Nope. As the parent comment said, there is lack of guidance and mentorship. Many people are unaware of the spam they are creating and genuinely believe what they are doing is acceptable.

Culturally, India is not really homogenous so I can't say anything for the 1.34 billion people but at least in the region I live in, cheating is normalized since first grade. Be it contests, exams or any other status games. Shortcuts are encouraged. There is little incentive for anyone to play fair. Schools want to look good on paper and competitive so they help students cheat, pay for false advertisements and enrollment. Parents do the same and well, kids will learn it if you incentivise that.

For the job seeking, it's pretty much desperation and high unemployment rate.

[geraltofrivia]

Certainly there are cultures where this holds to some extent. However, the spammy PR, the low-effort oncoming nature that is being discussed is not associated with folks from this culture, as much as it is by some commonly prevalent sentiment in CS colleges, which generally move you to be proactive, get your name known, have a colorful (green) github commit frequency chart (?), and other faux markers of excellence which (are believed to ) increase the chance of getting hired for good positions.

[unishark]

> Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.

I have been told something to this effect. That some families, for example, are "business oriented" and raise their children to view everything as negotiable and for the taking. While other families may be focused on engineering or something else. It fits with strong parental involvement there, and the expectation that the children must support the prior generation. Easiest to push children in a direction you know. Basically multi-generational career goals.

[pavanky]

Unfortunately the largest demographic always gets demonized even if spam is not just limited to a particular group.

Through sheer scale, spammers of Indian origin may be more noticeable than others and thus reinforcing the stereotype.

[searchableguy]

Eh, I would the say the ratio itself looks bad here. I am always surprised by how normalized and acceptable spamming is in the form of whatsapp forwarding. It's truly frightening watching my family use facebook and whatsapp groups. The spam to content ratio is like 10:1 or heck 20:1. Maybe even worse. .

[pavanky]

I am guessing you havent been on the internet 20 years ago when Indians were barely on the internet and email spam and forwarding was a huge thing.

The issue was solved by Google (and others) stepping up their spam detection game. The spam problem can and should be stopped with the technology, but I am not sure if Facebook has the motivations to do this.

[asicsp]

>I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice.

Hey, I'd like to help if possible. I'd probably not have the time to mentor, but I can help with learning resources. All my books are free to read online (https://github.com/learnbyexample/scripting_course#ebooks) and I have lots of bookmarks collected over the years. For example, Python(https://learnbyexample.github.io/py_resources/) and CS(https://github.com/learnbyexample/curated_resources/blob/mas...)

If you are interested, connect with me on twitter (https://twitter.com/learn_byexample) or mail me on gmail (use HN username)

PS: I'm Indian too, but I don't think that'll necessarily help here.

[thorwarasdasd]

This is exactly the kind of spam we’re talking about. And I saw the repositories.

[galkk]

Man, they're awful :(

I looked into Python and regex