Hacker News Reader

Comment by brycelarkin | Hacker News Reader

Separate Github profiles for work and personal.

Is it normal for people to have separate profiles like that on Github?

Yes, of course. In fact it is a pretty bad idea to use the same profile for an employer. Always treat an employer as disposable, along with the respective GitHub username for it.

I would say most devs use same GitHub profile for work and personal projects. GitHub provides pretty easy way to join various organizations with same handle. It almost seems exception when a developer creates a new profile for work.

The practice can vary significantly by the employer. Some employers prefer the usernames be new and unique to the employer, whereas others don't care. It's obvious that it's a major liability for the employee to reuse the username for personal and professional organizations.

Yeah, exactly. Personally I always thought that was a better policy (to have separate profiles) but I've actually had senior devs in the org tell me to just use my personal one and add my work email to it, so that's what I did. Seemed strange to me but I didn't question it too much. Maybe I should've, lol.

Not normal enough. Would you do all your personal emailing on your work email? I don't know why so many people have a blind spot when it comes to GitHub

At $JOB, it's mandated to have a separate GitHub account

I certainly do - my work GitHub profile is attached to my work email address whereas my personal GitHub is attached to my personal email address.

it's a complete separation of responsibilities in the same way that I have a work laptop and a personal laptop.

Yes. My work GitHub account is via SSO using my work creds. My personal GitHub account is much older and uses my personal email address.

Of course, we can’t (or shouldn’t) be uploading any of our code to GitHub for work. We have self-hosted Bitbucket servers. The corporate GitHub accounts are strictly used for Copilot.

If/when I leave the company, I’m pretty sure they don’t want all the code tied to my personal account. That sounds like a nightmare. I don’t want that either.

Thanks all. You've convinced me. I'll set up a new profile for the next time I need to work with a company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com