Ask HN: Is fake GitHub profile data a thing?

Of course “fake” GitHub accounts are a thing. Just like people pump up their resumes in general. What you’re describing may simply be people who heard that having a GitHub profile with some stuff on it was a good idea. So they uploaded a bunch of projects and got their friends to “like” them. At least I’d personally like to think that people who are actively out to “cheat” on their GitHub repos genuinely put a little more effort into it than that.

I’m not sure if it constitutes as a red flag, but you can always take a look to see if the repo “starring” goes both ways, or/and ask about it.

I would be looking out during the interview if that person takes credit but doesn’t do the work, talks a good game but no delivery, blames others when their work is examined closely and finally not doing their work to a high level when it’s not getting closely validated

Maybe it’s some kind of arms race against companies expecting massive side projects but there is an element of if I can get away with it more $$ to me

There is always a market for fake <insert thing that gives you credentials>. No matter how strange or niche it sounds. Fake personal websites, FB pages, twitter profiles, Yelp listings, dating profiles. When in doubt, always be skeptical.

- fad chasing

- making plans without executing them, using forks as upvote button

- when you make or fork a repo, it shows to ur followers, hence same people each time

and yeah, they do things to make number go up, consider it "metagaming" as opposed to like, bad stuff. Anyone is allowed to play github how they want!

as always, check their original code, la commits done by their accnt, ignoring anything silly (small, low effort commits) as punishing someone for being silly, is a bit silly, look at their PRs, look at their projects they have efforted on, etc, if there are none, then just treat it like they had no github.

Maybe there are just students. My school did not teach us Git, our programs were graded by algorithms and teachers.

I had built simple but not trivial programs like a Raytracing engine in C, a basic shell with AST, globbing etc.

When I started looking for my job, I just took the time to migrate some of these projects to Github. The project was already finished and unversioned, so I just

git init git remote add git add . git commit git push

Not the best, but it was the best I could do at that time.

Because many recruiters use automated tools to filter candidates. These tools use your github profile statistics to see how "active" you have been, regardless of the content of your projects. You would think it makes sense to build actual projects, but who has time on projects when they are working 8am to 6pm plus 2 hour commute every day? This is why people fake their github profiles to pass recruiters.

I'd say you could accomplish the same goal by making an auto-commit script to make your contribution history green (which can be done retroactively as well!) and get recruiters that are none the wiser to see what a stellar shipper you are. Heck, I can even name someone who was eventually hired at Github who did this and said it led to more conversations during interviews about how exactly it was done.

The contribution graph is definitely something I wouldn't put too much faith in considering there are lot's of projects out there specifically made for drawing pictures in them.

https://github.com/blaise-io/contribution as an example

I wanted to moan about how the best coders have GitHub repos but keep most of them or atleast the best private so they can perhaps build a side business out of them , thus making them less likely to get selected as a solid spare time coder.

I’m kind of retired now so I’m now less perturbed by it and more empathic towards business owners who must find it nearly impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff especially if the interviewee like me refused to do technical tests.

At the end of the day I realise now I was competing against dishonest candidates and I never stood a good chance I’m lucky I’m sought after now but that’s only because of my experience.

> Most of the repos have five to ten stars each, but if you open them up they are basically the same people over and over starring all the repos.

As a datapoint, this happens in a few of my repos. There's really nothing interesting in some of them (homework assignments from when I was in college), but there are a couple of profiles who star almost all my repos. I don't know them in real life, don't know where they came from.

Yeah, interesting. I was wondering if something like that could be happening.

At some point people were told a Github profile will make you standout. With the right incentives, it is most definitely a thing.