[georgemcbay]

Using total number of github commits as any sort of qualifier for employment is as bad (maybe even worse) as asking for a wc -l LOC count on your last project.

To be clear, I don't have an issue with github contributions being seen as a plus for hiring... but trying to turn this into something concretely quantifiable via total commit count (especially on commits you can't even see) seems crazy to me.

Please let me know which employers are asking you for this information so I can avoid applying to them in the future!

[Ryel]

They are not(I hope) judging quality of my work based on # of commits.

-They are assuming I have little to no experience in a service they use every day.

-They are assuming I don't contribute to Open Source in any way (I contribute to private repos that are at the core of several large OS projects but are private for business concerns).

-Github provides an easy metric to see what most of my work is. I can see that 45% of my work is done in Python, and maybe the rest in front-end tech. That would be useful information to an employer if I apply to an Obj-C position.

Actually the work I am most proud of is in my side-projects, which I would much rather employers go on and interact with rather than scour over the github repo. Posted above is not just something I want, but something I see much more value in for Github to become a more friendly intermediary between employer/employee.

[gaadd33]

> They are assuming I don't contribute to Open Source in any way (I contribute to private repos that are at the core of several large OS projects but are private for business concerns).

How are those open source? Or are they open source but not open to third party contributions? Or does development not take place on github? Just curious since if the code isn't public I'm curious how it's considered open source.

[Ryel]

I explained it poorly.

When we can't afford to keep building a feature, we release it as open source and reintegrate it eventually.

[jmduke]

How would you handle this case if the work you're doing that's being stored on private GitHub repositories wasn't on GitHub at all (like the majority of tech work that employees do for their employer)?

[Ryel]

I see what you're hinting at but the point of that question is lost on me.

That's like going up to Elon Musk and asking, why make electric cars when most people drive internal combustion engines?

[stbtrax]

The point is that it's not entirely useful for employers, which seems to be what you're concerned about. If 80% of people are committing to private corporate source control, and 20% are committing to private github accounts, it's not readily apparent why you would care to see some vague statistics about commit frequency for 20% of your candidates.

[rmc]

-They are assuming I don't contribute to Open Source in any way (I contribute to private repos that are at the core of several large OS projects but are private for business concerns).

If you're commiting to private repos like that, then you're not contributing to open source.

Sure, you're programming, and contributing to projects that others use, and yes, your github profile doesn't show that. But it correctly shows your level of open source contributions.

[bertil]

As someone who designs metrics for a living… Yeah, it would be… bad. But if they are fine with screen grabs, it's most likely a filtering system: real talent selection is at the interview level. For instance, I have no idea what to answer when they ask if I'm a developer (I ‘code’ in SQL and Python to set up BI metrics). If they ask for that kind of pre-requisite, I know what they mean and I shouldn’t apply. Same for: what kind of editing software/UDI/Python or R package do you prefer? I'm not expecting them to judge how clueless I am by saying “I know scikit-learn is cool, but I prefer pyml” but rather, that I know what those are.