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Comment by carterklein13 | Hacker News Reader

I think #6 should be in big bold font at the top.

I know Hacktoberfest is certainly exacerbating the problem, but as an open-source contributor for ~2 years myself, but someone who has been working on side projects using GitHub for like 7 years now I've noticed a significant uptick in bullshit PRs in the past year or so.

I have a hunch it's because a lot of bootcamps / tutorials / etc are encouraging students to just "contribute to open source." People may either not know exactly what that entails, or may just be just as lazy in their bootcamp as they were in school.

I've gotten PRs on my school projects from 5 years ago fixing typos in comments. I'm not sure how people even find those repos, and I'm even more confused why they'd feel the need to "contribute" unless someone is telling them to without any additional context.

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It's definitely partly thanks to the bootcamps and whatnot because a bunch of the advice when finishing the programs revolves around having a consistent amount of github projects and commits to fill up that chart with green squares on your profile.

They didn't tell us to pick random projects from 5 years ago but they also didn't go into ettiquette about commits or really how to properly contribute, just "make sure your github is very active because that's what employers and recruiters want to see." My anxiety shoots through the roof just thinking about hitting up some random school project though...that's a bit far for me lol.

Ugh, I hate stuff like that. Number of GitHub contributions, lines of code, number of commits - these don't actually tell people anything. I know to a recruiter doing a cursory glance, these things may be important, but it's just frustrating. I'd so much rather see one high-quality, ideally squashed PR/commit per week.

What constitutes "bullshit"? I ask because I wouldn't want new contributors, or folks considering a contribution to shy away from one after reading a comment like that. In the large projects I'm a part of maintaining, even small typo fixes are welcome (and encouraged) because as maintainers we just can't see everything. Will people abuse small PRs to try and raise their profile? Sure. Do I believe everyone has ill intent? Not at all.

I really appreciate small Pull Requests that come in to fix small things - it's something I don't have to do as maintainer, and it lets someone take a small step towards a larger contribution.

Definitely a valid point, I'll clarify because I definitely don't want people to shy away from open-source as I think it's some of the more altruistic work developers can do. Even typo fixes may not be a bad thing. I more mean things like a PR that removes a contraction (i.e. I've gotten a PR changing "won't" to "will not" in one place).

I feel like trying to get meaningless PRs accepted on big projects is a desperate attempt at gaining clout by being listed on contributors so people can say "yeah I've worked on this huge thing" and people likely won't check what they have actually done.

Would people actually do this? Any context in which "having participated in this huge thing" would be valuable (such as a job interview) would require the person to explain their role in such "huge thing". This can backfire awfully if the answer to that is "I replaced « I'm with I am ».

A lot of people do this - just like I've seen a lot of people put "Arctic Code Vault Contributor" on their LinkedIn pages, or list that they're a student at MIT because they're taking a Coursera course taught by an MIT professor. Typically, the folks who do this do not really consider the quality of work put on a resume/LinkedIn. Having contributed to some open-source projects over the past couple, I've come across this a lot.

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