Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jrochkind1

> As a GitHub user, I was always seeking green squares to try to make sure I had activity every day.

I have never paid any attention to that at all. It surprises me that some do.

Do you think it's common?

View on HN

Do you think it's common?

Yes. I see it more and more these days, especially among recruiters and HR departments.

I believe there's an inverse correlation between the value one places on green squares and their understanding of what it actually takes to build software...

https://eddiots.com/931

https://eddiots.com/447

https://eddiots.com/2461

https://eddiots.com/2390

Exactly. I hate this too. I'd rather keep my github activity private. It's nobody's business to know if I commit 30 times per hour or once per week.

On the other hand I recently encountered a very interesting hiring process. I think this is the first time in 20 years when I'm encountering some "new idea in recruitment" and I actually think it's good for everyone.

I'm talking about coding/other task based challenges you complete on your own. I recently got something like this sent by a recruiter. (2 coding challenges, one - writing a email to a junior colleague telling them how to troubleshoot an imaginary backend issue). I was very pleasantly surprised that web based system had over 20 languages you could choose from to complete the challenges and once I've completed it around midnight my time, by 7am it was already scored (by humans and pretty well).

I much prefer this kind of stuff to traditional "share your screen via video all and code live" or pre-covid, write your code with a pen on a whiteboard...

As for cheating possibility... They openly allow one to use Google etc, but there is barely enough time to complete the task, so someone extensively searching on Google, or trying to use chatgpt for the task would run out of time tweaking the prompt very quickly.

i am not exactly a fan of coding challenges and i do like laive coding, but that challenge to write an email to a junior colleague telling them how to troubleshoot an imaginary backend issue sounds like something i'd really enjoy doing.

I think this is a good hiring process. There is research which suggests that the hiring process which produces the highest performing hires is one that sticks as closely as possible to evaluating the candidate's performance on the specific tasks involved in the job.

In a dev job you're writing code, you have some degree of time constraint, you get to use Google. You're emailing a colleague with advice/suggestions. So yep. That company's test is pretty on the money.

We've used a similar process and it's super interesting to be on the hiring side and compare the results from different candidates when you give them the same problem. There were people who sounded really smart and polished in an interview but then bombed the coding test.

I've been a proponent of the code-to-hire process for at least a decade.

There are for sure some challenges (some legal, some technical) but those replace other challenges that I think are less effective.

Interviews are pretty low value for skill-set - mostly for personality.

GitHub and SocialMedia spying don't reveal much about the Person-at-Work.

So, currently we find a nice candidate, brief interview for personality/communication then code test them. And I pay for the time too - but that value is capped for tax/paperwork reasons.

Was this the Woven-ran 4 question (recommendation system, email junior, invoice, database schema) interview? If so, I think the 4 questions are pretty good. The issue is I've had the exact same interview 3 times now from 3 different companies who use Woven.

If not, it sounded quite similar.

At one point, you could backdate commits and push them to GitHub to make art with the red/green squares. I don't know if that still works, but recruiters generally won't be able to tell whether you're faking commit activity.

This definitely still works.

HR departments many times hardly read the CV before the interview, let alone spending time on Github repos.

Additionally many people cannot make their work public anyway.

I remember a HN post where someone used git history to make pictures out of their github tracker. Seems like a silly thing for companies to pay attention to. I'm pretty sure you can make up old history if you want, too -- just turn yourself into a commit rockstar!

>I have never paid any attention to that at all. It surprises me that some do.

Same. I'm only now realizing some people actually do care about that, from the replies to this thread. I think it's weird. I'm not religious (or theist for that matter), but caring about these things reminds me of Matthew 6:7-8:

"But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

But I can see how "gamefying" things to get improved consistency and thus better results can be beneficial to some. Not for me, sadly.

Same. In fact, I discovered git-backdate [1] which can specifically be used to hide the fact that your working hours are a bit deranged.

[1] https://github.com/rixx/git-backdate

Nice, I had been thinking for a long time about writing such a tool that adjusts all commits on personal projects to be outside business hours (although of course that's not going to be an acknowledged use).

Either you discovered it within the 10~ish days it exists or someone is fudging the timeline...

It was 5 days ago

These green squares helped John Resig for about 4 years: https://johnresig.com/blog/write-code-every-day/

Interesting angle. This kind of robotic tracking has also helped me with personal aspirations (exercise a key one). I suppose it is all in how you use it. In fact, I even stopped using it at one point for another activity because it was making it feel like a chore. For that one it is more satisfying to allow myself to skip it.

Seems the same as chasing Pokemons or trying to become the "mayor" of something on FourSquare - a useless virtual accolade.

I think it is common, but completely absurd.

Why are green squares _every day_ a good thing?

Have a life. Live your life. There is more than just code.

I've used github for 10 years or more. I've never met someone who pays attention to the green squares. I see some online but that's it

This thread is the first time I’ve even heard about people caring about the squares.

Would you say that it's because they're probably at home chasing green squares?

Joking aside, I've known only one person who did (does?) this. They're a great engineer but frequently get into the weeds on assignments. This is just anecdote, but these types of people definitely exist.

I hire programmers (and was one for more than two-and-a-half decades). I don't look at green squares on GitHub.

Others are saying they experience this, but couldn’t that be solved by using one of the many projects that completely spoof the history?

I mean there are folks with histories which would make you greeen with envy, but you can have the same history with ~0 effort, making it immaterial.

I used one of those in the past and it was a great subject of interest in my interviews.

They thought I hacked Github or something. Good time :)

Did you just fill the entire thing, or did you display scrolling ascii art?

Woth crons in github actions I’ve been thinking you could create an entire movie, especially with a random generator à la Progress Quest.

I had an interview where I had linked my SO and my GitHub. The latter just because it wasn’t completely empty.

He cheekily complained that I didn’t have much activity.

I used to use it to make sure I made progress on projects my aim was I would do something everyday. Some days I did very little other days I did alot. I stopped caring about that approach. I got a bunch of stuff done but really I ended up making one line changes just so I kept my streak and I technically did something.

Same, except I found that even the one-line changes just to have committed something were useful for keeping me in touch with whatever project I was choosing to work on. It also gave me extra motivation to fix relatively trivial problems that would otherwise annoy me a little but not enough to otherwise justify the effort to `cd $project_dir && git pull && nano $relevant_file && make test $$ git commit`. A lot of unit tests and documentation improvements got written this way, a few minutes per day.

I occasionally look at my green squares for fun. Stars and popular repositories are a better metric of someone's activity on GitHub. But all of this can be easily gamed.

Me neither, the quality of the stuff there isn't anything extraordinary.

Most value I produce is commercial and under NDA.

My private time is for family and friends, not coding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com