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GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

manishearth.github.io

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know; I'm still a student and have never had the chance to experience this first-hand. Various people have mentioned similar things though. https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/597276242887348224 https://twitter.com/nick_r_cameron/status/597328012787384320

I doubt it, that's a very silly measuring stick. It's nice when we have a candidate with a GH history, but I'd venture a guess that 90% of the best code written by the engineers we hired was written for some other company in private repos. I can't imagine that being too far outside the norm.

Sadly, there are a lot of absolutely silly measuring sticks in widespread use in tech industry hiring. Remember when everyone was asking logic puzzles because they heard that's what MS did?

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it, that's a very silly measuring stick. It's nice when we have a candidate with a GH history, but I'd venture a guess that 90% of the best code written by the engineers we hired was written for some other company in private repos. I can't imagine that being too far outside the norm.

Sadly, there are a lot of absolutely silly measuring sticks in widespread use in tech industry hiring. Remember when everyone was asking logic puzzles because they heard that's what MS did?

What do you mean "remember"? They still do that! :/

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#23
post #7

Using a lack of GitHub contributions as a way to disqualify candidates sounds like a really bad idea. Does anyone do that? Seems like a strawman argument.

While I do understand that there's possible misrepresentation resulting from judging candidates based SOLELY on GitHub profiles, for those with presentable contributions/projects readily available on GitHub, I feel it makes for a much fairer representation of the candidate than many of the alternatives (whiteboarding, solving algorithm puzzles under pressure, cultural fit tests, etc).

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#24
post #16

FYI, the GitHub streak can be manipulated.[0] My apologies for the lack of documentation. Basically, since you can modify the author and commit date in Git, you can trick GitHub into thinking you've committed something several years in the past[1] or the future[2]. Some people have written things that allow you even write messages into the commit graph[3]. [0] https://github.com/zg/streaker [1] https://github.com/zg/…

Yeah, I know.

In fact I have a bunch of commits on my github account that predate the account itself because of commits imported from a project that used to be on svn.

As I mentioned in the post; the streak is useful as a personal metric; so if you're cheating, you know, and it's pointless :)

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, there are a lot of absolutely silly measuring sticks in widespread use in tech industry hiring. Remember when everyone was asking logic puzzles because they heard that's what MS did?

What do you mean "remember"? They still do that! :/

[deleted]

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, there are a lot of absolutely silly measuring sticks in widespread use in tech industry hiring. Remember when everyone was asking logic puzzles because they heard that's what MS did?

What do you mean "remember"? They still do that! :/

No, no, now they do that because they heard that's what Google did. Wrong bubble. :P

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#27
post #7

Using a lack of GitHub contributions as a way to disqualify candidates sounds like a really bad idea. Does anyone do that? Seems like a strawman argument.

While I do understand that there's possible misrepresentation resulting from judging candidates based SOLELY on GitHub profiles, for those with presentable contributions/projects readily available on GitHub, I feel it makes for a much fairer representation of the candidate than many of the alternatives (whiteboarding, solving algorithm puzzles under pressure, cultural fit tests, etc).

Yes, absolutely (and many of those alternatives suck).

On the other hand, there's something of an inherent metrics bias when you evaluate some candidates on one metric and others on a different one. It's very hard to calibrate those two scales, and there's a risk that you'll be tempted to do things like compare one candidate's GitHub PRs to another candidate's whiteboard code. Even if you don't make that comparison directly, you'll never dislike a GitHub-evaluated candidate for not remembering standard APIs, making off-by-one errors (if they have the luxury of a test suite), taking half an hour to understand a problem, etc. You'll never dislike a whiteboard candidate for breaking with existing style, not commenting or writing good commit messages, being a jerk to people who send in support requests as issues, not being able to respond to code review feedback, etc.

If you have unlimited headcount, you might be able to set independent baselines for both styles of evaluating candidates (although tuning them will, again, be hard), but if you're at all comparing candidates to each other, it seems likely to cause one set of candidates to have a much easier time than the other, based on which things your engineers value. And, necessarily, that means you'll be willing to hire worse candidates from one set than from the other.

Using a GitHub profile to bypass a coding challenge, FizzBuzz, or similar is fine. Using it to break ties or to allow a candidate to express "I'm actually good at my job, even though I'm bad at interviews" is probably fine, especially if there are other ways to do those. But having two different evaluation strategies is likely to be unfair both to yourselves and to the candidates.

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#29

I've written in the past about how I love streaks as a motivating tool.[0] It gives a motivation to get up and do something , when you'd rather do nothing. One thing I try to do on goals that require an action, is not to add stipulations to it like the OP eventually did in the beginning. If you make the hurdle too large you're more likely to break the streak and more likely to fall into inaction, so allowing a small…

It is actually demotivating to me. I know I can never live up to my epic October streak, so why bother?

Re: GitHub streak: End-game and post-mortem

#30

I wonder how you can go on that long. You can easily see in mine ( https://github.com/daurnimator ) when I went on vacation for 3 weeks in November/December last year.

Well, last summer I was doing GSoC so it was easy. During the semester I have to stay put anyway. Any weekend excursions I would be taking a laptop with me for studying (we have a lot of coursework, and I usually am overloaded with stuff so I need to allocate at least some weekend time for coursework) so I would squeeze in some programming and push it when I got access to internet again. Programming is a refreshing c…

Your streak is impressive. I have a question - Do you ever suffer from FOMO [1] while investing yourself in writing code everyday? Of course, I know, programming is fun but does it turn into anxiety when you see other people's achievements?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

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