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Comment by grantcox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.)

Perhaps it was more of a personality test to see how you would answer and not them caring about gaps. Maybe they were seeing if you would come up with a crazy excuse and get defensive. Just a thought.

Edit - It is interesting without knowing intention people say to pass on the employeer. How many interviewers ask stupid questions not realizing they might miss out on a great hire? I think often companies forget that we are interviewing them as well. At any rate I think it's fair to ask in the interviewer why they are asking the question or what is their concern. Especially if the question already made you decide to turn down any offers.

Seriously?? is this what tech hiring has turned into? pseudo-reverse psychology and mind tricks. I didn't even know the "green" GH contributions were that important.

That seems like a reason to pass on them, to be honest.

I did pass because I'm way too picky about jobs to put up with that. But even so, what if I had been desperate for a job and passing just wasn't an option?

I also mentioned that this was a place that is widely regarded as a great employer. Most engineers would want to work there. It makes it really hard to say that the weird behavior of one recruiter is a good reason to pass, but at the same time, no one should have to put up with having their frequency of open source contribution questioned like that.

Oh, no, I don't disagree with you and the culture of celebrating spending every waking hour writing code is harmful. But, also, if someone asked me that and I wasn't totally desperate I would be dropping out of consideration at that point.

This is a really dumb way of thinking about things. If you truly think this person has a mental issue, then tweaking the commit graph on github is not going to do anything about it.

I disagree, it seems like enabling someone's unhealthy behavior is something that should be avoided in society. Although perhaps that's a bit of a slippery slope? For instance, some people are alcoholics and we still sell alcohol and I don't view that as wrong. Though we do for instance prohibit overservice. I'd love to hear some other people's opinions.

i think you don't agree with yourself there. anything can be taken by someone the wrong way.

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 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.

Zach Holman has an interesting writeup on focusing on maintaining that streak, and how it (among other factors) eventually led to burnout:

https://zachholman.com/posts/streaks/

Personally, I find the contribution chart both motivating and frustrating. The contribution chart is enough of a signal that I try to make sure it looks healthy each week. But, at the same time, it's far from a perfect tool for assessing how productive I am, because commits come in all shapes and sizes. And like any gamified metric, it can lead to unhealthy obsessions.

Arguably anyone who falls for gamification has "a problem," to one degree or another. But if we know that certain personalities are more likely to have unhealthy obsessions with something, that's maybe a good reason to take it down, or at least lessen the focus on the "streak" and represent activity more positively without highlighting the gaps.

Geoff Greer has a great counterpoint to that article (published around the same time):

http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/01/07/burnout-is-in-the-mind/

Burnout is the western equivalent of "fan death," really? I don't buy it.

I appreciate the argument that burnout is more like depression, and should be approached with the same mindset. (i.e. simply taking time off of work might not cure it.)

But that's not really a valid counterpoint. One person's ability to have a 2-year Github streak is not evidence that burnout is just "in the mind," as he puts it. It just means that he's found a particularly sustainable balance. In fact, I'd argue that he's kind of an outlier. That 2-year streak would definitely not work for everyone.

What we commonly refer to as "burnout" can also surface with very physical symptoms. Blood pressure spikes, teeth grinding, weight loss or gain, physical exhaustion, even heart attacks. Maybe these symptoms are better attributed to stress or lack of exercise, but when they are a result of overwork and, more specifically, the compulsive need to work at a certain level despite all costs, that's burnout. It's not good and should not be taken lightly.

> 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.

I don't see a claim that any particular person cares deeply about the commit graph.

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