Betrayed by github activity graph
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I was reviewing a job candidate with the HR lady, and noticed this on the guy's corporate GitHub profile:
Notice absolutely no weekend commits. Not even one over the past year.
So the guy is either working in the most organized, well-run company ever (in which case, his work is probably pre-chewed and boring), or he refuses to lend a hand during crunch times / crisis.
I told that to the HR lady and now that is a slight black mark against him.
Then I realized what I've done, and now I'm ashamed.
But if I thought of this, other HR consultants/interviewers will too. So be mindful of those activity graphs!
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
So the guy is either working in the most organized, well-run company ever (in which case, his work is probably pre-chewed and boring), or he refuses to lend a hand during crunch times / crisis.
Or maybe his company isn't terrible and lets employees have the weekends to themselves?
I've worked one weekend ever, and it was some server maintenance stuff that absolutely needed to be done outside of regular hours. I don't think I've ever done a source control commit on a weekend.
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@mott555 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I've worked one weekend ever, and it was some server maintenance stuff that absolutely needed to be done outside of regular hours. I don't think I've ever done a source control commit on a weekend.
Thus, I am ashamed.
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Notice absolutely no weekend commits. Not even one over the past year.
Mine would be the same.
There's nothing in the 11 years I've been in current job that's been /that/ serious that has required me to both
- write code and
- commit it
over a weekend.
Investigate stuff, sometimes. But write stuff that needs to be committed then? Nah.
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@mott555 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Or maybe his company isn't terrible and lets employees have the weekends to themselves?
This.
Unless your company is a young startup, or a major, unforeseeable event occurs, crunch time isn't normal. It means either the management is bad at planning, or they're doing it deliberately because it saves them money and they can get away with it (example: the entire video games industry).
Discriminating against applicants who used to work in properly-run companies is unfair. And given the average competence of HR workers, telling them that is irresponsible. (even if I know you probably didn't do that on purpose.)
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If there's an assumption there will be work on weekends, then the company is terrible and I don't want to work there. Not everything is predictable, things happen, I understand. But if they think about working weekends when hiring, then it's either uncontrolled chaos there, or they bully their employees for unpaid overtime.
Of course no recruiter will admit that their company is a labour camp/chaotic clusterfuck, but "what do you think about working on weekends, when there's need for that?" is a red flag.
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@cartman82 I just realized I should commit bugfixes on certain days so that the activity graph spells out 'deez nuts'.
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Notice absolutely no weekend commits. Not even one over the past year.
Which is... bad?
@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
So the guy is either working in the most organized, well-run company ever (in which case, his work is probably pre-chewed and boring),
How does A lead to B here? Even if he was doing "pre-chewed and boring" work (whatever that even means-- all software development work is boring, and I never chew my code), what the hell does that have to do with your hiring process? Maybe he applied specifically because he wants to move into "unchewed and exciting" work?
or he refuses to lend a hand during crunch times / crisis.
If the company isn't shitty, it never has crunch times or crises.
@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I told that to the HR lady and now that is a slight black mark against him.
Congratulations, you're a dick.
@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Then I realized what I've done, and now I'm ashamed.
Well at least you realize you're a dick, but maybe next time don't be a dick in the first place.
@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
But if I thought of this, other HR consultants/interviewers will too. So be mindful of those activity graphs!
What? Why?
Look, for all you fucking know this project requires some HUGE brand new speech recognition technology and this guy's spent EVERY weekend prototyping some insanely complex and interesting algorithms and he just never checked them in to GitHub because they were prototypes.
That stupid chart doesn't tell you jack shit.
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@Zerosquare said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Discriminating against applicants who used to work in properly-run companies is unfair. And given the average competence of HR workers, telling them that is irresponsible. (even if I know you probably didn't do that on purpose.)
Even looking at this chart is unfair, because it's a fucking useless chart.
Most software development work does not involve checking in source code. Setting up servers, no check-ins. Doing usability tests, no check-ins. Writing documentation, no check-ins. Prototyping a new technique of doing something, no check-ins. Learning the business domain so they can write better code to serve it, no check-ins.
In fact, the good stuff that you want your programmers do be doing don't involve checking in code. The programmers who just do nothing but sit and type in code are the bad ones.
EDIT: doing manual QA, no check-ins. Actually designing the product before writing code, no check-ins.
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@Zerosquare said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Discriminating against applicants who used to work in properly-run companies is unfair. And given the average competence of HR workers, telling them that is irresponsible. (even if I know you probably didn't do that on purpose.)
Even looking at this chart is unfair, because it's a fucking useless chart.
Most software development work does not involve checking in source code. Setting up servers, no check-ins. Doing usability tests, no check-ins. Writing documentation, no check-ins. Prototyping a new technique of doing something, no check-ins. Learning the business domain so they can write better code to serve it, no check-ins.
In fact, the good stuff that you want your programmers do be doing don't involve checking in code. The programmers who just do nothing but sit and type in code are the bad ones.
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@cartman82 The real WTF is a corporation directly or indirectly reveals information about their employees' development activity to the public. Is this something a corporation or individual can hide on their Github account, or is this a serious breach in privacy I should worry about should any employer I am with chooses to use Github?
Not to mention even if he had weekend work you still have no clue the value of those commits. Remember The Contractor's Note, where the commits were mostly just adding comments that didn't even describe the code, but was just variations of
// hmmm!
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
But if I thought of this, other HR consultants/interviewers will too
No they don't.
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
So be mindful of those activity graphs!
No. If a company's gonna use my activity graph as a metric for how good I'm at work, I'll be glad to not waste my time interviewing or working with people like that.
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Showing your private contributions and achievements on your profile - GitHub Docs
Your GitHub profile shows a graph of your repository contributions over the past year. You can choose to show anonymized activity from private and internal repositories in addition to the activity from public repositories.
Private only - you can't hide public ones:
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@The_Quiet_One said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Is this something a corporation or individual can hide on their Github account, or is this a serious breach in privacy I should worry about should any employer I am with chooses to use Github?
The best you can do is maintaining a separated git history for your public code (if you're doing opensource or have to publish it for any reason). Then you could rebase and publish everything as a single commit once a week, or just change all timestamps or something.
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@sockpuppet7 And I suppose if you didn't use Git at all, Cartman would be like NO HIRE HE DOESN'T USE GIT THE BEST MOST AMAZING TECHNOLOGY EVAR!
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
all software development work is boring
I believe you made the wrong career choice
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@TimeBandit said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I believe you made the wrong career choice
When I got into the industry in the late 90s it was a more interesting industry. That was back when it was all about usability and user experience and coming up with new and innovative development tools, before it was taken-over by the cabal of Unix developers screaming "DO EVERYTHING LIKE WE DID IT IN 1986 FOREVER!"
Hell back then, Filemaker and Microsoft Access had better GUI-builders than the most popular open source-y languages now do. Apple had a macro recorder that worked system-wide and didn't require one touch of a CLI. AOL was inventing "buddy lists" and had a well-designed IM program that read your messages using text-to-speech.
It's not me who changed, it's the industry.
And yes I hate everything about my career, thanks for reminding me.
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@cartman82: is the actual code public?
If so, look at the code. That's the interesting part.
If not... what's the point of an activity graph alone? Some people commit every little change, some people prefer to aggregate them into "packets" ; their activity graph looks completely different. But that doesn't tell you anything about how competent they are.
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@PJH said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Showing your private contributions and achievements on your profile - GitHub Docs
Your GitHub profile shows a graph of your repository contributions over the past year. You can choose to show anonymized activity from private and internal repositories in addition to the activity from public repositories.
Private only - you can't hide public ones:
You slack off for entire seasons! Unhireable!
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Also notice how the candidate from the OP slacks off on most Wednesdays. Fuck this guy. Definitely not hired. Having someone who slacks off on Wednesdays is the worst thing that can happen to a company.
Who slacks off midweek? I bet he drinks heavily on Tuesday nights. Probably alcoholic. This looks like the guy is far worse than we initially thought so.
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@PJH And even then, I believe they show up on the graph, they just don't show what repository they're in? Unsure what "anonymized" means in this context but it's not invisible.
But yeah, the graph is useless because commit date/time can be modified so easily in Git. I've absolutely played tricks with my graphs, i.e., "No, professor, I definitely didn't wait until the night before to write the proof of concept code for my project-- you can see I wrote it two weeks ago!"
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@The_Quiet_One said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
You slack off for entire seasons! Unhireable!
Sadly, my check-ins to our company's private SVN server aren't shown on that graph...
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@heterodox said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I've absolutely played tricks with my graphs, i.e., "No, professor, I definitely didn't wait until the night before to write the proof of concept code for my project-- you can see I wrote it two weeks ago!"
Yeah, sure, I can totally see that from the code quality and commit dates.
sigh. yet another kid playing games with his commit dates. do they think I learned Git yesterday?
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@heterodox said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@PJH And even then, I believe they show up on the graph, they just don't show what repository they're in?
No, they don't.
As seen by me:
As seen by others with private enabled:
As seen by others with private disabled:
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
all software development work is boring
You know, there are people in the world that aren't like you. Some programmers actually enjoy programming, and like all hobbyists, they can see differences between different software projects that normal people wouldn't ever notice, and these differences determine how much fun they're having working on a particular project. Starting from scratch, for example, is usually more fun than working with legacy code, as well as solving interesting problems without obvious solution.
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
before it was taken-over by the cabal of Unix developers screaming "DO EVERYTHING LIKE WE DID IT IN 1986 FOREVER!"
I thought it was like in 1970
Hell back then, Filemaker and Microsoft Access had better GUI-builders than the most popular open source-y languages now do.
Your knowledge of open-source tools is so great, I'm sure I can just totally trust your opinion
XScreensaver is the only way to lock the screenI would choose Qt over Filemaker or Access any time
And yes I hate everything about my career, thanks for reminding me.
Always glad to help
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@TimeBandit said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I thought it was like in 1970
Because nothing changed in those 16 years, it's just as accurate to say it's the same as in 1986
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@Zerosquare said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Discriminating against applicants who used to work in properly-run companies is unfair. And given the average competence of HR workers, telling them that is irresponsible. (even if I know you probably didn't do that on purpose.)
... if you spend your entire career working in large, well organized corporations, maybe you won't be able to cope when thrust into a process-less startup environment. As I've seen happen a couple of times.
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@MrL said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
If there's an assumption there will be work on weekends, then the company is terrible and I don't want to work there. Not everything is predictable, things happen, I understand. But if they think about working weekends when hiring, then it's either uncontrolled chaos there, or they bully their employees for unpaid overtime.
Of course no recruiter will admit that their company is a labour camp/chaotic clusterfuck, but "what do you think about working on weekends, when there's need for that?" is a red flag.
Actually, I haven't even once worked after hours or on weekend in my new company. In fact, here is my graph on the internal git.
I am just saying, if this image was the only thing someone had to go on when deciding whether to try and recruit me, they might wonder.
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Most software development work does not involve checking in source code. Setting up servers, no check-ins. Doing usability tests, no check-ins. Writing documentation, no check-ins. Prototyping a new technique of doing something, no check-ins. Learning the business domain so they can write better code to serve it, no check-ins.
One of them isn't software development work, two others totally involve check-ins.
@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
EDIT: doing manual QA, no check-ins. Actually designing the product before writing code, no check-ins.
EDIT: Two aren't software development work, three involve check-ins.
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@mott555 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
So the guy is either working in the most organized, well-run company ever (in which case, his work is probably pre-chewed and boring), or he refuses to lend a hand during crunch times / crisis.
Or maybe his company isn't terrible and lets employees have the weekends to themselves?
I've worked one weekend ever, and it was some server maintenance stuff that absolutely needed to be done outside of regular hours. I don't think I've ever done a source control commit on a weekend.
This. I can't remember the last time I worked a weekend. Ever. In 26 years of working on Windows.
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@Zerosquare said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@cartman82: is the actual code public?
If so, look at the code. That's the interesting part.
If not... what's the point of an activity graph alone? Some people commit every little change, some people prefer to aggregate them into "packets" ; their activity graph looks completely different. But that doesn't tell you anything about how competent they are.
Even when code streaks on the activity page were still a thing you could find stuff like this:
GitHub - avinassh/rockstar: Makes you a Rockstar C++ Programmer in 2 minutes
Makes you a Rockstar C++ Programmer in 2 minutes. Contribute to avinassh/rockstar development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub - angusshire/greenhat: :construction_worker: Quick hack for making real work happen.
:construction_worker: Quick hack for making real work happen. - angusshire/greenhat
GitHub - gelstudios/gitfiti: abusing github commit history for the lulz
abusing github commit history for the lulz. Contribute to gelstudios/gitfiti development by creating an account on GitHub.
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@Zerosquare said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@cartman82: is the actual code public?
If so, look at the code. That's the interesting part.Unfortunately, it's not. His linkedin is empty too. The graph was pretty much the only thing I had to go on there.
A bit of a lesson there.
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I am just saying, if this image was the only thing someone had to go on when deciding whether to try and recruit me, they might wonder.
Maybe you should stop coming up with impossible hypothetical situations.
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@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
I am just saying, if this image was the only thing someone had to go on when deciding whether to try and recruit me, they might wonder.
Maybe you should stop coming up with impossible hypothetical situations.
In the real world, you have to make some kind of determination.
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@cartman82 in the real world, you have the candidate's resume.
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@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@cartman82 in the real world, you have the candidate's resume.
Not in 2018, where there is a developer drought and all the hr people are linkedin hunting directly for applicants and trying to poach them from competition.
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@cartman82 in the real world, you have the candidate's resume.
Not in
2018Serbia, wherethere is a developer drought and all the hr people are linkedin hunting directly for applicants and trying to poach them from competitionsalaries suck.FTFY. But yes, I can see why going by resume might be a problem.
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@Gąska yes, hard to go by resume when you don't have it
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@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
You know, there are people in the world that aren't like you.
Degenerates.
@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Some programmers actually enjoy programming,
I enjoy creating software. (I even do it as a hobby.) I don't enjoy programming. Programming is by far the worst, most boring, most un-fun part of creating software.
@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
and like all hobbyists, they can see differences between different software projects that normal people wouldn't ever notice, and these differences determine how much fun they're having working on a particular project.
So they get all giddy because the code uses one implementation-detail technology over another? Who gives a shit. It's all implementation-detail.
The only thing that matters is the parts the user sees.
@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
as well as solving interesting problems without obvious solution.
99.9% of the time this just means the developer:
- Doesn't have enough experience, doesn't read enough, etc. (In other words, they think the problem has no obvious solution when there's like 30.)
- Their solution sucks ass.
The other 0.1% of the time the code could have been avoided entirely if better design decisions had been made up-front.
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@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
One of them isn't software development work, two others totally involve check-ins.
Well I suppose it depends on how your company's run. If you don't have a good solution for document sharing, you might check-in your documentation. I don't know why you'd check-in a quick and dirty prototype. Maybe in a different repo if you think it'll be around longer than a couple days.
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@dcon said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
This. I can't remember the last time I worked a weekend. Ever. In 26 years of working on Windows.
I've done deploys and a little debugging work. But like Mott says, nothing that would involve checking-in code.
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@stillwater said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Also notice how the candidate from the OP slacks off on most Wednesdays. Fuck this guy. Definitely not hired. Having someone who slacks off on Wednesdays is the worst thing that can happen to a company.
Who slacks off midweek? I bet he drinks heavily on Tuesday nights. Probably alcoholic. This looks like the guy is far worse than we initially thought so.Good point. I didn't even think of that.
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
What? Why?
Look, for all you fucking know this project requires some HUGE brand new speech recognition technology and this guy's spent EVERY weekend prototyping some insanely complex and interesting algorithms and he just never checked them in to GitHub because they were prototypes.
That stupid chart doesn't tell you jack shit.But probably not. He probably just spent weekends with his family, the slacker.
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BTW how does this dumb feature treat pull requests? If I build up a pull request every day but my asshole boss only approves all of them on Fridays, does that count as a check-in every day or just one big one on Friday? If the latter, developers who worked at companies with good processes would look worse than those who just checked-shit directly into Master on a whim.
So many problems with this stupid chart.
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@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
@sockpuppet7 And I suppose if you didn't use Git at all, Cartman would be like NO HIRE HE DOESN'T USE GIT THE BEST MOST AMAZING TECHNOLOGY EVAR!
Still sore about git winning the version control war, I see.
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@cartman82 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
But probably not. He probably just spent weekends with his family, the slacker.
The point is there's nothing in that chart that supports either conclusion. Maybe he did spent all weekend in a drunken bender and would have worked if he could have managed to stumble to his computer. Chart won't tell you that's why; it won't tell you that's not why.
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@mott555 said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Or maybe his company isn't terrible and lets employees have the weekends to themselves?
Or, he has absolutely no life because during weekends he worked for another company which does not use Github.
@blakeyrat said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
you want your programmers do be doing
To be is to do. —Socrates
To do is to be. —Plato
Do-be-do-be-do. —Sinatra@Gąska said in Betrayed by github activity graph:
Starting from scratch, for example, is usually more fun than working with legacy code
It depends on how legacy it is. Figuring out well-written legacy (or at least not horribly written) can sometimes give me the feeling of an exciting investigation.
