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by solatic 1478 days ago
Precisely. LinkedIn doesn't specialize in software, it's a glorified résumé database. We all know that résumés don't really tell you whether an engineer is going to do good work for you; if they did, the only purpose of engineering interviews would be for culture fit. At the same time, even if all of an engineer's contributions were fully in the open and linked to from their GitHub profile, it's all a bit too much for a hiring manager to parse per résumé that they receive.

Achievements is a way of distilling contributions down to the important questions that hiring managers have: just how senior is this person I'm interviewing anyway? If I hire this person to do cutting-edge work, are they the kind of person to interact with the community on pushing the state-of-the-art, or not?
1 comments
anarticle 1478 days ago
I think you are riding a horse that is driven by a cart :D.

Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users. If the feature does not seem to serve them, it might not be a good one.

If github is a tool, then the words hiring manager probably shouldn't appear. I don't think of "what will my product person think?" when I use grep.

Also, didn't we do this when the award was tshirts for commits to open source projects where it unleashed a firestorm of junk edits to projects?

If SNR gets low enough, people will migrate. I know some people have left github for gitlab, and are having a whale of a time with their runners etc. Replacing junky old jenkins installs for in the fence CICD.

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solatic 1478 days ago
> look at it from the perspective of users

It sounds like your perspective is that users don't get any value out of social media?

Why do people post photos to Instagram? Why post updates to Facebook?

You can take photos for your own benefit (like writing code for some non-GitHub-related benefit, e.g. work) and also share them on social media for your own gratification. You can live life for the fun of it and also share it on social media for your own gratification. (leave aside that social media is net-toxic, it's still worth it to understand the motivations of those who engage with social media).

Don't want to engage with the social media aspects of GitHub that they're adding (because social media is net-toxic)? Fine. Disable the achievements. They (smartly) built in that disable switch. But don't presume that there isn't a large portion of GitHub's userbase that won't get value out of this.

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wizzwizz4 1478 days ago
> Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users.

Why? Everybody I've talked to who's considered alternatives and still uses GitHub for projects that don't have to be on GitHub does it because they're looking at it from the perspective of potential employers. (Or because they like GitHub's Projects feature enough, but those are rarer.)

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