11 ms·

GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

207 points by tomhardman0 11y ago

Khao 11y ago
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.
- hobs 11y ago
  Reading the first sentence, this is definitely an april fools joke.
  - Khao 11y ago
    I genuinely can't tell.
- konschubert 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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 11y ago
        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 11y ago
  People care a ton about their streaks and I have noted that before. It encourages people to not have weekends.
  - donatj 11y ago
    As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)
    - arien 11y ago
      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...
      - donatj 11y ago
        There actually are a handful of tools that let you cheat including one that lets you write text onto the chart.
      - kedean 11y ago
        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 10y ago
        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
- grantcox 11y ago
  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.
  - MBCook 11y ago
    Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster? That seems very harsh.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      I don't see a claim that any particular person cares deeply about the commit graph.
    - grantcox 11y ago
      "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.
      - KirinDave 11y ago
        > 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.
- deleted 11y ago
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- wyldfire 11y ago
  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 http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431
- emodendroket 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    You can’t cash personal satisfaction; that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. The reputation system feeds you with rewards so you continue.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      Yes. I agree.
- deleted 11y ago
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- ronnier 11y ago
  I saw people talk about it at Amazon (internally there's the exact same concept as github's contribution graph)
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  > 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/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/
- jcoffland 11y ago
  GitHub is totally over thinking this. I barely notice the social networking aspects of GH.
- vivekian2 11y ago
  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.
- hinkley 11y ago
  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.
tombert 11y ago
I guess I can see this being an issue, but as someone who generally has a pretty "green" contribution chart, I find people look more at how many stars I have more than anything.
- prezjordan 11y ago
  Which is another discussion all together :-\ I used to be all about stars, not very explicitly, but it definitely went into my decision-making process when working on side projects whether I wanted to admit it or not. Sadly this has caused me to not ship silly-little-experiments-that-no-one-will-care-about like I used to before my "stars." The bar's a little higher now.
altotrees 11y ago
Have I made pithy comments or tiny modifications occasionally to keep a streak alive? Maybe... but that was pretty much limited to my earlier days of using Github. Now, I think one or two days of quality commits a week (on personal projects) is far superior to straining to make tiny changes for the sake of a streak.
phkahler 11y ago
>> The contribution graph and the statistics on it, prominent on everyone's profile, basically rewards people for doing work on as many different days as possible, generally making more contributions, and making contributions on multiple days in a row without a break. If you're concerned about those things, you need to do some deep introspection and fix whatever issues you have inside yourself.
- phkahler 11y ago
  Same thing regarding the downvote ;-) But seriously, it's open source. Everyone has their reasons for contributing, but if you're trying to manipulate your stats in order to satisfy some psychological issue, well then you've got an issue. Why not address it instead of trying to feed it?
  - phasmantistes 11y ago
    You're presenting a false dichotomy. Yes, it may be true that people whose lives are made worse by their internal need to make their chart all green have deeper problems to deal with. But that doesn't mean that GitHub and the rest of the community have to continue to rub it in their face and aggravate those issues with a constant reminder that they "should be contributing more". Recognizing that people may have problems, recognizing that the activity graph and streak metric may aggravate those problems, and then saying that the charts shouldn't be removed and the people should just deal with it themselves is not particularly empathetic.
    - phkahler 11y ago
      >> But that doesn't mean that GitHub and the rest of the community have to continue to rub it in their face and aggravate those issues with a constant reminder that they "should be contributing more". That's the problem, the stats are just that. Anyone interpreting them as an indicator of "should be contributing more" should chill. But I do see your point. >> Recognizing that people may have problems, recognizing that the activity graph and streak metric may aggravate those problems, and then saying that the charts shouldn't be removed and the people should just deal with it themselves is not particularly empathetic. To be honest, I didn't read the entire piece, I just got far enough to cringe at this whole notion of people trying to play games with the stats and wanted to comment. I have been looking inward myself lately, and while I have found it very challenging or even painful at times, it is one of the best things I've ever done. Highly recommended. We've all got our issues...
rambos 11y ago
"Stop rewarding those who worker harder than me"
- wambotron 11y ago
  I know people who commit CONSTANTLY. They may not push for a while, so they can end up with a small pull request that has 100+ commits. It has nothing to do with how hard someone works, and more to do with how often they commit. I don't care about the community aspect of it, but I worked at a corporation that did care about those graphs when they're completely meaningless. When your bonus depends on how many commits you make, why not commit once per line?
  - rambos 11y ago
    thats not the argument made in the issue
- deleted 11y ago
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- emodendroket 11y ago
  It's more like "stop encouraging self-destructive and ultimately counter-productive behavior." Long hours don't necessarily mean productive work.
takno 11y ago
The reason sites do gamelike features like this is because it makes some people care and therefore participate more. Setting a metric which causes poor quality contributions or is damaging to participants is a bad thing. I'd guess a steak of 4 day weeks would be more productive. Personally if I cared about this metric I would just set something up which held onto Friday's commits and pushed them out over the weekend.
jkot 11y ago
I think its irrelevant stat. Single commit can take 1 second or several weeks of work. And several people have cron jobs for website synchronization etc...
vdnkh 11y ago
Occasionally I'm motivated to do some work so I don't "break the chain". I try not to sweat it though.
pksadiq 11y ago
Hm... Absolutely true for me. Mostly because my code is hosted at GitLab, and I don't usually mirror at GitHub. ;-)
mattkrea 11y ago
He should be focused on fixing the problems with npm.. not nonsense like this.
- jacobwg 11y ago
  isaacs owns the repo, but it's just a community place to discuss issues with GitHub. You can find more info at https://github.com/isaacs/github https://github.com/isaacs/github.
dubcanada 11y ago
Has to be a joke... I mean if you really care you can just checkout the repo and generate your own graphs.
- _1 11y ago
  But then no one else is going to see your graphs. That's what gamification is about.
kiyundai 11y ago
I never like the contributions graph in github, i always find it quite meaningless. Feel like it could be more interesting to extend the repositories graph to users, it seems more like usefull data
frewsxcv 11y ago
To me, coding is fun. Stockholm syndrome? Maybe? Regardless, I don't think people aren't in a position to tell others what is/isn't fun. https://xkcd.com/359/ https://xkcd.com/359/
- emodendroket 11y ago
  I like reading books, but I don't want to spend every waking hour reading either.
whichdan 11y ago
I'm surprised at how dismissive all of the comments have been so far. There are a lot of cultural habits around programming that are exclusionary, and if we're trying to pull more people into the field, discouraging people who can't code every single day could have a negative impact. It's at least worth exploring.
- jerf 11y ago
  "Exclusionary" connotes a lot of things nowadays, especially something like "something that 80% of the people within the culture can do and they lock out those that can't". But the reality is that the vast majority of people really can't commit usefully every day. If I see a perfectly green graph, I assume it's been gamed. Even if the commits are real, I'm confident many days will have useless commits in them. Given the political firepower currently carried by "exclusionary", I don't think it's worth flinging it at this problem. It's a stupid metric like your level on Google Play or the count of Platinum trophies you have on your Sony account, making only a small percentage of people do something they otherwise wouldn't, not something preventing anyone from getting into programming or something.
  - whichdan 11y ago
    Okay, that's a fair point. I do think you bring up something important: we're all aware that a perfectly green graph means that it's either been gamed, or that the person spends an inordinate amount of time coding, but someone new to the field would have no idea.
    - mitchty 11y ago
      I guess I'm glad that my github graph looks like the end of a minesweeper game. >.< Its not that I'm not working, just that most of the stuff I do I tend to either cleanup and squash commits for, or they tend to be very much research project type deals that sure I can commit something but most of the time it would end up as: "this didn't work", "neither did this". I'd love to commit something meaningful every day but honestly can't be arsed most of the time. If I'm sitting there at a serial terminal figuring out why I can't boot on an arm board, what silly thing should i commit? I have org notes that document that stuff, commits are for semi useful things not a measure of work/worth.
hippich 11y ago
Last year I had new year resolution to have each square in my graph to become some shade of green. Did I contribute very many very small commits? Yes. Did I think about everything I do daily from a global/sharable/modular perspective? Absolutely! Did it make a dent in the world? No. Yes, it was stressful at times. But I still think I became a bit better at approaching problems from re-usability perspective.
deleted 11y ago
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snowwrestler 11y ago
Fake Internet points result in all sorts of counterproductive or at least neutrally productive behavior. It's true here on HN. Some people get mad when a link they submitted gets voted up when someone else submits it later. I love this comment from Github: > if you look at my contribution chart right now you will notice that it is completely green, why is that (for the people that do not know the trick) I simply commit changing the date manually using this Bash script Very capably demonstrates how stupid the point-counting is, while at the same time capably playing the stupid game. But there are arguably positive effects to the gamification. Here on HN, the points give people incentive to browse the NEW list to vote and comment. Getting in on the ground floor of a popular post is the key to getting a lot of upvotes. It also gives people incentive to know what the heck they are posting about, or at least do some basic fact-checking and editing before hitting the button. On Github the graph incentivizes commitment, which is desirable in open source projects. Taken too far, people will burn out--true. But I bet the opposite is far more common: I bet a lot more promising open source projects die from lack of effort than over-effort.
ihsw 11y ago
The problem is people are using it as a signal for measuring someone's worth. There are so many other signals -- learning new programming languages, fixing broken tests, creating awesome new features, cleaning up crufty API libraries, and so forth -- but GitHub isn't showing them on profile pages. Clearly there is a desire for such signals as people are either 1) using it to elevate one's perceived stature 2) using it to measure other people's perceived stature. Personally I think this is an opportunity for GitHub to obviate such a signal, one that accurately measures someone's quality of work.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  I don't think "obviate" is the right word here, nor do I know how you would measure those other things programmatically.
p4wnc6 11y ago
As I mentioned in another comment, I've had interviewers grill me about gaps in my contribution history before. I sometimes will link to a pedagogical Python package that I maintain to show how I work with Python/Cython, and also that I know the ropes with packaging, complex travis-ci scripts, and workflow management on GitHub. I expect them to ask about that project, or the handful of other open source contributions I've made, but would never expect them to go hunt down my contribution history and nitpick. In one case it was a non-technical HR interviewer who thought it was clever to grill me about why I hadn't made a commit to a certain repo in several months. It was the repo where I store configuration files, like .emacs, and I just didn't have any config updates in that time period. However politely I tried to say that's just not the sort of repo that would reflect regular engineering, she did not seem willing to drop it, and went on about how they want to hire "passionate" developers who code "because it's in their DNA." O_o I really wish GitHub would allow users to disable the contribution tracking if they wish. I don't like the idea that an interviewer, or a boss, can go digging around and maybe even try to use it against me (e.g. you said you couldn't come in to work this weekend, but I see that you were able to commit something on an open source project...) Even if that risk is low, why should we have zero ability to choose not to bear it? The saddest part is that when this has happened in interviews, it's been with two major US tech companies that are popular and widely regarded as places that many people want to work. So it's not as easy as dismissing a recruiter who snoops through your GitHub contributions. The company they represent may be widely known to be excellent.
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ocdtrekkie 11y ago
I use the contribution graph and streak count to encourage me to keep working on a side project of mine. I don't do development for my job, and my side projects I regularly abandon. Trying to use the GitHub streaks feature to encourage me to make at least a small commit to my side project every day has actually led to me getting much further on it and working much more on it than I ever expected. It keeps me looking at and going back to my code. Yes, it's irrelevant and frivolous. Yes, it's easy to cheat on (if you feel like cheating yourself). But you can use it for good if you want to, and I'm glad it's there.
zenogais 11y ago
Even though this may just be an April Fool's joke. My 2 cents. This is a "give a man a fish" solution that doesn't address the root cause of the issue (and that parable is all about fixing root causes). This likely has more to do with the inability of some individuals to create personal boundaries and regulate their own behaviours than it does with the presence of an infographic. That individual inability will still be around even if the infographic goes away, because as in the parable if you don't fix the root cause the other person is in the same situation again tomorrow.
- phasmantistes 11y ago
  I'm not sure the analogy holds. Yep, some people have difficulty building boundaries between their work life and their non-work life, or between their coding life and their non-coding life. (Some people don't want to build those boundaries, and that's fine, but some people do want to build them and yet have a hard time doing so.) But just because they have a hard time doing something other people find easy doesn't mean we shouldn't make it even easier. Removing the graph or the streaks metric isn't "giving someone a fish". It is realizing that they have difficulty catching fish when they try, and giving them a net to make it easier.
  - zenogais 11y ago
    This isn't an issue of making something easier for everyone. Sadly it's not that cut and dried. This is a request to destroy or completely disfigure, to the point of uselessness, a UI element that some people and teams legitimately find useful, all for the sake of protecting people (we don't know who or how many) who might plausibly harm themselves using it because of a lack of self control. Control that other people clearly demonstrate can be developed.
bjourne 11y ago
Everybody should know that working on free software in general is not healthy. :) There is no way that the fame, name recognition in the community, gratefulness received, CV padding or whatever makes up for your hours of free work. The time investment wont pay off. BUT if it is the act of writing code you like, then that doesn't matter. The "work" itself is the reward.
- cyphar 11y ago
  > Everybody should know that working on free software in general is not healthy. :) There is no way that the fame, name recognition in the community, gratefulness received, CV padding or whatever makes up for your hours of free work. The time investment wont pay off. How about personal satisfaction? That's definitely worth a lot. Not to mention that I got my first job from free software contributions alone. That's also worth something and did pay off (of course that's not why I contributed to free software).
- jswny 11y ago
  I disagree. My experience with free software, albeit small, is a positive one. I gain immense satisfaction from knowing people use and rely on pieces of software that I've written. When my users ask me for updates and make feature requests, I get excited and it really drives me to work. In addition, any time I see my software in use in the wild, I feel like a proud father watching his child grow up.
dreamdu5t 11y ago
Please start naming employers that ask why you have gaps in the graph. I'd like to know who they are.
siegecraft 11y ago
Does no one else just run a script to put amusing pixel-based graphics on their contributor chart? Sadly they decay as time passes and/or I make real commits. But such is the temporary nature of art.
cirosantilli 11y ago
Look, ma, no graph! https://github.com/cirosantilli https://github.com/cirosantilli | https://web.archive.org/web/20151021135921/https://github.com/cirosantilli/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151021135921/https://github.co...
- hobo_mark 11y ago
  Ok I'll bite, how?
  - cirosantilli 11y ago
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20099235/who-is-the-user-with-the-longest-streak-on-github/27742165#27742165 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20099235/who-is-the-user-...
dsmithatx 11y 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?
- phasmantistes 11y 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.
  - dsmithatx 11y 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.
    - phasmantistes 11y 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.
leshow 11y ago
If you're worried about someone else's commit graph. The solution isn't to end the commit graph, it's for you to stop caring about what other people are doing.
coleifer 11y ago
Who cares, this is some real 4chan bait if you ask me.
evook 11y ago
I create a fresh github throw away accounts every time I contribute to a project. Is something wrong with me?
schoen 11y ago
When I saw this title, I thought it was going to be about privacy rather than about incentives and motivation! I was envisioning something about Orthodox Jews who secretly code on shabbat and had other people notice because of their contribution graph, or maybe people whose employers thought an employee's graph reflected too much or too little effort or effort at the wrong time or something. ("Why are you working on the weekends?" or "why are you not working on the weekends?", maybe.) On the other hand, the privacy argument might be hard to sustain because an external site or tool can regenerate much of it from the user's individual git commits.
mibrah 11y ago
The author is arguing against pressure to perform in general. He wants to take away the gold star system and give everyone an A. Wouldn't that be nice.

207 points by tomhardman0 11y ago

Khao 11y ago

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.

hobs 11y ago
Reading the first sentence, this is definitely an april fools joke.
- Khao 11y ago
  I genuinely can't tell.
konschubert 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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 11y ago
        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 11y ago
People care a ton about their streaks and I have noted that before. It encourages people to not have weekends.
- donatj 11y ago
  As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)
  - arien 11y ago
    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...
    - donatj 11y ago
      There actually are a handful of tools that let you cheat including one that lets you write text onto the chart.
    - kedean 11y ago
      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 10y ago
        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
grantcox 11y ago
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.
- MBCook 11y ago
  Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster? That seems very harsh.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    I don't see a claim that any particular person cares deeply about the commit graph.
  - grantcox 11y ago
    "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.
    - KirinDave 11y ago
      > 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.
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wyldfire 11y ago
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 http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431
emodendroket 11y ago
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 11y ago
  You can’t cash personal satisfaction; that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. The reputation system feeds you with rewards so you continue.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Yes. I agree.
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ronnier 11y ago
I saw people talk about it at Amazon (internally there's the exact same concept as github's contribution graph)
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> 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/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/
jcoffland 11y ago
GitHub is totally over thinking this. I barely notice the social networking aspects of GH.
vivekian2 11y ago
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.
hinkley 11y ago
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.

tombert 11y ago

I guess I can see this being an issue, but as someone who generally has a pretty "green" contribution chart, I find people look more at how many stars I have more than anything.

prezjordan 11y ago
Which is another discussion all together :-\ I used to be all about stars, not very explicitly, but it definitely went into my decision-making process when working on side projects whether I wanted to admit it or not. Sadly this has caused me to not ship silly-little-experiments-that-no-one-will-care-about like I used to before my "stars." The bar's a little higher now.

altotrees 11y ago

Have I made pithy comments or tiny modifications occasionally to keep a streak alive? Maybe... but that was pretty much limited to my earlier days of using Github. Now, I think one or two days of quality commits a week (on personal projects) is far superior to straining to make tiny changes for the sake of a streak.

phkahler 11y ago

>> The contribution graph and the statistics on it, prominent on everyone's profile, basically rewards people for doing work on as many different days as possible, generally making more contributions, and making contributions on multiple days in a row without a break. If you're concerned about those things, you need to do some deep introspection and fix whatever issues you have inside yourself.

phkahler 11y ago
Same thing regarding the downvote ;-) But seriously, it's open source. Everyone has their reasons for contributing, but if you're trying to manipulate your stats in order to satisfy some psychological issue, well then you've got an issue. Why not address it instead of trying to feed it?
- phasmantistes 11y ago
  You're presenting a false dichotomy. Yes, it may be true that people whose lives are made worse by their internal need to make their chart all green have deeper problems to deal with. But that doesn't mean that GitHub and the rest of the community have to continue to rub it in their face and aggravate those issues with a constant reminder that they "should be contributing more". Recognizing that people may have problems, recognizing that the activity graph and streak metric may aggravate those problems, and then saying that the charts shouldn't be removed and the people should just deal with it themselves is not particularly empathetic.
  - phkahler 11y ago
    >> But that doesn't mean that GitHub and the rest of the community have to continue to rub it in their face and aggravate those issues with a constant reminder that they "should be contributing more". That's the problem, the stats are just that. Anyone interpreting them as an indicator of "should be contributing more" should chill. But I do see your point. >> Recognizing that people may have problems, recognizing that the activity graph and streak metric may aggravate those problems, and then saying that the charts shouldn't be removed and the people should just deal with it themselves is not particularly empathetic. To be honest, I didn't read the entire piece, I just got far enough to cringe at this whole notion of people trying to play games with the stats and wanted to comment. I have been looking inward myself lately, and while I have found it very challenging or even painful at times, it is one of the best things I've ever done. Highly recommended. We've all got our issues...

rambos 11y ago

"Stop rewarding those who worker harder than me"

wambotron 11y ago
I know people who commit CONSTANTLY. They may not push for a while, so they can end up with a small pull request that has 100+ commits. It has nothing to do with how hard someone works, and more to do with how often they commit. I don't care about the community aspect of it, but I worked at a corporation that did care about those graphs when they're completely meaningless. When your bonus depends on how many commits you make, why not commit once per line?
- rambos 11y ago
  thats not the argument made in the issue
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emodendroket 11y ago
It's more like "stop encouraging self-destructive and ultimately counter-productive behavior." Long hours don't necessarily mean productive work.

takno 11y ago

The reason sites do gamelike features like this is because it makes some people care and therefore participate more. Setting a metric which causes poor quality contributions or is damaging to participants is a bad thing. I'd guess a steak of 4 day weeks would be more productive. Personally if I cared about this metric I would just set something up which held onto Friday's commits and pushed them out over the weekend.

jkot 11y ago

I think its irrelevant stat. Single commit can take 1 second or several weeks of work. And several people have cron jobs for website synchronization etc...

vdnkh 11y ago

Occasionally I'm motivated to do some work so I don't "break the chain". I try not to sweat it though.

pksadiq 11y ago

Hm... Absolutely true for me. Mostly because my code is hosted at GitLab, and I don't usually mirror at GitHub. ;-)

mattkrea 11y ago

He should be focused on fixing the problems with npm.. not nonsense like this.

jacobwg 11y ago
isaacs owns the repo, but it's just a community place to discuss issues with GitHub. You can find more info at https://github.com/isaacs/github https://github.com/isaacs/github.

dubcanada 11y ago

Has to be a joke... I mean if you really care you can just checkout the repo and generate your own graphs.

_1 11y ago
But then no one else is going to see your graphs. That's what gamification is about.

kiyundai 11y ago

I never like the contributions graph in github, i always find it quite meaningless. Feel like it could be more interesting to extend the repositories graph to users, it seems more like usefull data

frewsxcv 11y ago

To me, coding is fun. Stockholm syndrome? Maybe? Regardless, I don't think people aren't in a position to tell others what is/isn't fun. https://xkcd.com/359/ https://xkcd.com/359/

emodendroket 11y ago
I like reading books, but I don't want to spend every waking hour reading either.

whichdan 11y ago

I'm surprised at how dismissive all of the comments have been so far. There are a lot of cultural habits around programming that are exclusionary, and if we're trying to pull more people into the field, discouraging people who can't code every single day could have a negative impact. It's at least worth exploring.

jerf 11y ago
"Exclusionary" connotes a lot of things nowadays, especially something like "something that 80% of the people within the culture can do and they lock out those that can't". But the reality is that the vast majority of people really can't commit usefully every day. If I see a perfectly green graph, I assume it's been gamed. Even if the commits are real, I'm confident many days will have useless commits in them. Given the political firepower currently carried by "exclusionary", I don't think it's worth flinging it at this problem. It's a stupid metric like your level on Google Play or the count of Platinum trophies you have on your Sony account, making only a small percentage of people do something they otherwise wouldn't, not something preventing anyone from getting into programming or something.
- whichdan 11y ago
  Okay, that's a fair point. I do think you bring up something important: we're all aware that a perfectly green graph means that it's either been gamed, or that the person spends an inordinate amount of time coding, but someone new to the field would have no idea.
  - mitchty 11y ago
    I guess I'm glad that my github graph looks like the end of a minesweeper game. >.< Its not that I'm not working, just that most of the stuff I do I tend to either cleanup and squash commits for, or they tend to be very much research project type deals that sure I can commit something but most of the time it would end up as: "this didn't work", "neither did this". I'd love to commit something meaningful every day but honestly can't be arsed most of the time. If I'm sitting there at a serial terminal figuring out why I can't boot on an arm board, what silly thing should i commit? I have org notes that document that stuff, commits are for semi useful things not a measure of work/worth.

hippich 11y ago

Last year I had new year resolution to have each square in my graph to become some shade of green. Did I contribute very many very small commits? Yes. Did I think about everything I do daily from a global/sharable/modular perspective? Absolutely! Did it make a dent in the world? No. Yes, it was stressful at times. But I still think I became a bit better at approaching problems from re-usability perspective.

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snowwrestler 11y ago

Fake Internet points result in all sorts of counterproductive or at least neutrally productive behavior. It's true here on HN. Some people get mad when a link they submitted gets voted up when someone else submits it later. I love this comment from Github: > if you look at my contribution chart right now you will notice that it is completely green, why is that (for the people that do not know the trick) I simply commit changing the date manually using this Bash script Very capably demonstrates how stupid the point-counting is, while at the same time capably playing the stupid game. But there are arguably positive effects to the gamification. Here on HN, the points give people incentive to browse the NEW list to vote and comment. Getting in on the ground floor of a popular post is the key to getting a lot of upvotes. It also gives people incentive to know what the heck they are posting about, or at least do some basic fact-checking and editing before hitting the button. On Github the graph incentivizes commitment, which is desirable in open source projects. Taken too far, people will burn out--true. But I bet the opposite is far more common: I bet a lot more promising open source projects die from lack of effort than over-effort.

ihsw 11y ago

The problem is people are using it as a signal for measuring someone's worth. There are so many other signals -- learning new programming languages, fixing broken tests, creating awesome new features, cleaning up crufty API libraries, and so forth -- but GitHub isn't showing them on profile pages. Clearly there is a desire for such signals as people are either 1) using it to elevate one's perceived stature 2) using it to measure other people's perceived stature. Personally I think this is an opportunity for GitHub to obviate such a signal, one that accurately measures someone's quality of work.

emodendroket 11y ago
I don't think "obviate" is the right word here, nor do I know how you would measure those other things programmatically.

p4wnc6 11y ago

As I mentioned in another comment, I've had interviewers grill me about gaps in my contribution history before. I sometimes will link to a pedagogical Python package that I maintain to show how I work with Python/Cython, and also that I know the ropes with packaging, complex travis-ci scripts, and workflow management on GitHub. I expect them to ask about that project, or the handful of other open source contributions I've made, but would never expect them to go hunt down my contribution history and nitpick. In one case it was a non-technical HR interviewer who thought it was clever to grill me about why I hadn't made a commit to a certain repo in several months. It was the repo where I store configuration files, like .emacs, and I just didn't have any config updates in that time period. However politely I tried to say that's just not the sort of repo that would reflect regular engineering, she did not seem willing to drop it, and went on about how they want to hire "passionate" developers who code "because it's in their DNA." O_o I really wish GitHub would allow users to disable the contribution tracking if they wish. I don't like the idea that an interviewer, or a boss, can go digging around and maybe even try to use it against me (e.g. you said you couldn't come in to work this weekend, but I see that you were able to commit something on an open source project...) Even if that risk is low, why should we have zero ability to choose not to bear it? The saddest part is that when this has happened in interviews, it's been with two major US tech companies that are popular and widely regarded as places that many people want to work. So it's not as easy as dismissing a recruiter who snoops through your GitHub contributions. The company they represent may be widely known to be excellent.

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ocdtrekkie 11y ago

I use the contribution graph and streak count to encourage me to keep working on a side project of mine. I don't do development for my job, and my side projects I regularly abandon. Trying to use the GitHub streaks feature to encourage me to make at least a small commit to my side project every day has actually led to me getting much further on it and working much more on it than I ever expected. It keeps me looking at and going back to my code. Yes, it's irrelevant and frivolous. Yes, it's easy to cheat on (if you feel like cheating yourself). But you can use it for good if you want to, and I'm glad it's there.

zenogais 11y ago

Even though this may just be an April Fool's joke. My 2 cents. This is a "give a man a fish" solution that doesn't address the root cause of the issue (and that parable is all about fixing root causes). This likely has more to do with the inability of some individuals to create personal boundaries and regulate their own behaviours than it does with the presence of an infographic. That individual inability will still be around even if the infographic goes away, because as in the parable if you don't fix the root cause the other person is in the same situation again tomorrow.

phasmantistes 11y ago
I'm not sure the analogy holds. Yep, some people have difficulty building boundaries between their work life and their non-work life, or between their coding life and their non-coding life. (Some people don't want to build those boundaries, and that's fine, but some people do want to build them and yet have a hard time doing so.) But just because they have a hard time doing something other people find easy doesn't mean we shouldn't make it even easier. Removing the graph or the streaks metric isn't "giving someone a fish". It is realizing that they have difficulty catching fish when they try, and giving them a net to make it easier.
- zenogais 11y ago
  This isn't an issue of making something easier for everyone. Sadly it's not that cut and dried. This is a request to destroy or completely disfigure, to the point of uselessness, a UI element that some people and teams legitimately find useful, all for the sake of protecting people (we don't know who or how many) who might plausibly harm themselves using it because of a lack of self control. Control that other people clearly demonstrate can be developed.

bjourne 11y ago

Everybody should know that working on free software in general is not healthy. :) There is no way that the fame, name recognition in the community, gratefulness received, CV padding or whatever makes up for your hours of free work. The time investment wont pay off. BUT if it is the act of writing code you like, then that doesn't matter. The "work" itself is the reward.

cyphar 11y ago
> Everybody should know that working on free software in general is not healthy. :) There is no way that the fame, name recognition in the community, gratefulness received, CV padding or whatever makes up for your hours of free work. The time investment wont pay off. How about personal satisfaction? That's definitely worth a lot. Not to mention that I got my first job from free software contributions alone. That's also worth something and did pay off (of course that's not why I contributed to free software).
jswny 11y ago
I disagree. My experience with free software, albeit small, is a positive one. I gain immense satisfaction from knowing people use and rely on pieces of software that I've written. When my users ask me for updates and make feature requests, I get excited and it really drives me to work. In addition, any time I see my software in use in the wild, I feel like a proud father watching his child grow up.

dreamdu5t 11y ago

Please start naming employers that ask why you have gaps in the graph. I'd like to know who they are.

siegecraft 11y ago

Does no one else just run a script to put amusing pixel-based graphics on their contributor chart? Sadly they decay as time passes and/or I make real commits. But such is the temporary nature of art.

cirosantilli 11y ago

Look, ma, no graph! https://github.com/cirosantilli https://github.com/cirosantilli | https://web.archive.org/web/20151021135921/https://github.com/cirosantilli/ https://web.archive.org/web/20151021135921/https://github.co...

hobo_mark 11y ago
Ok I'll bite, how?
- cirosantilli 11y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20099235/who-is-the-user-with-the-longest-streak-on-github/27742165#27742165 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20099235/who-is-the-user-...

dsmithatx 11y 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?

phasmantistes 11y 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.
- dsmithatx 11y 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.
  - phasmantistes 11y 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.

leshow 11y ago

If you're worried about someone else's commit graph. The solution isn't to end the commit graph, it's for you to stop caring about what other people are doing.

coleifer 11y ago

Who cares, this is some real 4chan bait if you ask me.

evook 11y ago

I create a fresh github throw away accounts every time I contribute to a project. Is something wrong with me?

schoen 11y ago

When I saw this title, I thought it was going to be about privacy rather than about incentives and motivation! I was envisioning something about Orthodox Jews who secretly code on shabbat and had other people notice because of their contribution graph, or maybe people whose employers thought an employee's graph reflected too much or too little effort or effort at the wrong time or something. ("Why are you working on the weekends?" or "why are you not working on the weekends?", maybe.) On the other hand, the privacy argument might be hard to sustain because an external site or tool can regenerate much of it from the user's individual git commits.

mibrah 11y ago

The author is arguing against pressure to perform in general. He wants to take away the gold star system and give everyone an A. Wouldn't that be nice.