Can anybody who uses this feature explain what github profiles are for?
I don’t know that I’d go so far as to explicitly hide that information, mostly because it is so mundane as to have no value to anybody.
I always look at profiles.
I spent a bunch of time, customizing mine: https://github.com/chrismarshallny
We're open source (https://robusta.dev) and very involved in the kubernetes ecosystem so GitHub history is extremely relevant when we look at candidates.
We'll hire people with no GitHub activity too, but when it's available it's great
If someone has an old GitHub account but very little activity, I assume they work at a leech company which uses opensource but doesn’t contribute back. I’m less likely to care about the needs of users like that. That said, professional software engineers will usually be more responsive in issue threads when they run into bugs. I’m much more likely to fix a bug if you can give me a good repro!
I kindly suggest you not lump in users/employees with the behaviors of their employers. Any company that i might work for might indeed be "leeches" as you noted, but that does not mean the user/associate/employee is one also. It might also be the case that said employee actually only works for such an employer as a necessity...you know for earning a living, but not really share the morals/ethics of the employer. Some employers require proprietary controls on their source code, hence preventing employees from using publicly availablr repos on github. Now, if i were to get "graded" on my low activity on github for personal projects, then i get your point...but to automatically lump in both employee and employer into one actor's ethics, seems not right.
You’re getting financial benefit from my donated effort. I don’t mind - I wouldn’t opensource my work if this bothered me enough. But GitHub issues opened by leeches have a certain entitled tang to them - “Hey could you donate more of your time so I can make more profit? I won’t pay you. Maybe you should be thanking me for finding problems in your work and pointing them out to you. Get to it!”
The reason you don’t contribute doesn’t matter. You’re profiting from my volunteer work and asking me to volunteer more so you can profit more.
Justify leeching to yourself how you like. But you won’t get respect from me until you contribute back.
And, yes, if you work at an immoral company, that is also absolutely on your hands.
If you disable Issues, I suggest also briefly explaining why you did that in the README to ensure you don’t get do-nothing Pull Requests asking how you’d like bug reports submitted.
I can respond with things like: "Oh, that problem? Yeah there's already code to work around it - here's what you need to do." Or: "You want that feature? I can see why thats valuable to you. I'm sorry but I'm never going to accept a PR from a stranger adding that. I don't need that feature for my workflow, and its complex, so the payoff isn't there for me to maintain the code. Fork my code, or implement that feature in an external library."
I'd much rather turn down a feature request in an issue tracker than turn down work in a PR, after someone has done all the work already for something I'm not going to merge. That feels bad for everyone.
If you write a good issue and take part in the discussion, that signals that you aren't taking my work for granted. Work with me to make a good repro case, and I'll work with you to fix the bug you're running in to.
Basically whenever I find a package I really like, or I'm skeptical about the profiles the first place I go.
What use is private profiles? Basically nil, but they want to turn GitHub into OnlyFans
I can use myself as an anecdotal example. I use GitHub mainly to store guides and neat tricks for myself, and to sometimes share some excellent code. All my current professional work lives in Azure DevOps, locked away so that you would never know so if I didn’t tell you. I have a NPM package that should be private but is public because we share it with some contractors and nonsense occurred (loooong story that is basically answered by “above my pay grade”). If you found it and looked at my GitHub profile, then you might use it, and you’d experience some breaking changes that you typically wouldn’t with good OSS NPM packages every time we make some major updates to it. Because we don’t really factor external user into our processes.
Usually, people have their stuff spread around, and the GH profile can be a "gateway" to the rest of their information.
In my case, I have a ton of open-source stuff, so my GH profile is a good starting point.
https://github-feed.tandav.me I wish the official GitHub newsfeed to show contribution updates instead of likes. Or even customize what to see in feed.