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GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

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Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#81

Post by BinaryIdiot »

Khao wrote: post #2

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.

> 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/

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#83

Post by __jal »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #42
grantcox wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've had interviewers ask me why I had certain gaps in my contribution graph before. Sometimes from large, successful tech companies that are widely sought after for jobs.

Happened to me, too. I must have lost my poker face at that point, because a couple of questions later the interviewer seemed to have noticed that I had lost interest, and asked why. That was a novel enough experience that I was honest, and just said that (a) winning at GH is of zero interest to me, and (b) a corporate culture that actually cares about that is judging their minions by bullshit metrics, causing all the well-known the problems that come from picking proxy measures that don't measure what you actually care doubt.

And if they actually do care about seven day work-weeks being the norm, that's substantially worse.

(Interview ended shortly after I got a muddy reply about how hard it is to measure developer productivity, so they use the metrics they can find, etc. Textbook example of a drunk looking for their keys under the lamp post, which completely reaffirmed my decision.)

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#84

Post by dsmithatx »

phasmantistes wrote: post #80
dsmithatx wrote: post #77

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?

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.

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.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#85

Post by KirinDave »

grantcox wrote: post #61
MBCook wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster? That seems very harsh.

"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 vulner…

> 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.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#86

Post by vivekian2 »

Khao wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#87

Post by phasmantistes »

dsmithatx wrote: post #84
phasmantistes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#88

Post by phasmantistes »

zenogais wrote: post #79

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…

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.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#89

Post by [deleted] »

dsmithatx wrote: post #84
phasmantistes wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#90

Post by phasmantistes »

phkahler wrote: post #13
phkahler wrote: post #7

>> 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.

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?

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.

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