Do they have work/life balance? Investigating potential employers with GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Do they have work/life balance? Investigating potential employers with GitHub

codewithoutrules.com

17 pointstomerbd14 comments

If you wanted to really speed things up, you could do this in an automated fashion or with google sheets (to suck in the graphic below).

For manual review: https://github.com/users/mooreds/contributions?to=2018-12-31

For more automation: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@simonwep/github-contributions or https://github.com/sallar/github-contributions-api look useful.

Two things to consider:

1) it's possible to hide private contributions from public profile

2) weekend coding is a vague info; one shall check what commits have been added, maybe the person is doing side projects, contributing to OSS, not related to work? Maybe the person actually enjoys coding and the amount of time spent during the weekend is "their healthy balance"?

Both of these are covered in the article.

1) That's why you should check multiple people's profiles.

2) That's why you should differentiate private from public repos, and again why you should check multiple people's profiles.

Any individual person doesn't tell you much. If you find 10 people all coding on the weekend on private repos on the same dates, it's probably not for fun, it's probably crunch time.

> Any individual person doesn't tell you much. If you find 10 people all coding on the weekend on private repos on the same dates, it's probably not for fun, it's probably crunch time.

Great info. Thank you.

If the employer has stuff on GitHub, then:

1. obviously they don't take security seriously

2. you could be asked to work on their stuff when you are at home

Point one is not obvious to me. Could you elaborate?

If you take security seriously, you make sure that only your own employees can access the data. This requires that you use your own hardware in your own facility.

For anything really important, you keep it on a LAN separate from the internet. You don't trust firewalls.

It's an interesting idea, and could probably be turned into some kind of product. I'm envisioning a product that pulls factors from multiple sources: GitHub posts, articles from media, etc and rates companies by work/life balance, along with some kind of measure for standard deviation.

Isn't that already GlassDoor? Even better, they pull straight from the source: employees.

It would capture some data from the majority who never end up leaving a rating one way or another.

When people code, most of the time, is unrelated to work-life balance. Many people code weekends if they slacked off during the week.

How many hours they code is probably a better indicator. Commit times and frequency aren't really indicative of hours invested in coding.

This post needs a disclaimer as "speculation"

> Commit times and frequency aren't really indicative of hours invested in coding.

I don't agree. Environments exist where people code 12+ hours a day, six days a week. Commit times and frequency are likely influenced by time invested in coding. Could you spend 12 hours on a problem with only one commit? Definitely! But if your commit window is spread across 12+ hours a day and the frequency of commits within that window is non-insignificant, it's unlikely that is artificially expanded from less work. It is a signal worth extracting.

You'd want to cast a net over as much of the engineering talent in an org that you can to find useful trends.

I would pay for this as part of some sort of Glassdoor/Stackoverflow Jobs hybrid. Only show me jobs where work/life balance doesn't suck.

But most companies use in house/private cloud hosted repository...

I agree.

Regardless of my productivity during the week, there are times during weekend where I wanted to continue working on a work project just because I genuinely enjoyed it or because there was something small I could do that would save a lot to the project/company and I did not mind at all.

IMO bringing work into your personal life does not necessarily indicate a poor work/life balance, being invested in your work either.

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