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Comment by SoKamil | Hacker News Reader

> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy, which I believe are at least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the “file an issue with Copilot” feature in everyone’s face.

Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling to get social credits.

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> Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired.

Do people really get hired for bunch of PRs to random repos on GH or just think they will? My impression has always been that GH profile is completely ignored by both recruiters and interviewers.

And this kind of behaviour is a red flag for people who actually go digging through the GitHub profile. Like techical people in the last stages of a hiring process.

Is this aspirational or anecdotal, or is this what technical people in FANNG/tech actually do? I hope it's true but it strikes me as the kind of thing that most technical people involved in the interview process would be too tired/overworked to do.

Nobody ever has brought up my GitHub though I did use my private GitLab projects to land my first dev job.

I agree. As a technical person who has been involved in hiring, I never looked at github. My evaluation of a candidate was based on how he/she answered questions in the interview, and my general sense of "could I work with this person every day." I had no spare time to go beyond that.

> "could I work with this person every day."

Communication skills (or lack thereof) on PRs or issues they opened is something I try to look for if they provide a Github profile. Signs of a big ego that will likely get in the way of day-to-day work is the main thing I look out for and it's sadly not that uncommon.

I've worked at a couple of companies with pay scales on part with FAANG, as well as a startup that was extremely selective in hiring. We rarely looked at GitHub, and never used it as a in a situation where someone got hired. I could see a situation where someone had good open source contributions it might help them get noticed by a recruiter, but that's so incredibly rare and hard to discover that it's kindof the last place people look. Having a good GitHub profile can't hurt, but LinkedIn is still king here

I've seen quite a few HR hiring processes where a mediocre HR person (knows to look for GH profile + activity on that, but not how to evaluate them) is paired with engineers with too little input power. In those processes, people that game their GH profiles tend to benefit.

GitHub (or any repo host) is/was pretty much the only thing I care about when looking at people's applications, because it's the only thing that has anything to do with incontrovertible reality. I certainly don't give a shit about whether or where you went to university and it's unlikely that I value your tenure at some company highly unless I know the people in that company.

Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror like how torvalds/linux is setup .

PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.

Yikes, the PRs on the Linux repo are quite terrible. At least there's a bot to auto-reply with the correct procedure.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1370

There's technically a way[1], but you'd have to do it every 6 months which is not great.

https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-comments-a...

Yeah, that's actually what we've done on the Zig GitHub repository. However, it doesn't stop pushes to existing PRs, which isn't ideal; and, yes, it's quite hard to escape the conclusion that there being no "until I turn it back on" option is intentional.

It's completely intentional, and goes back to when GitHub was founded. GitHub was intended as a collaborative software development platform, not "look but don't touch".

I suppose you can fork a repository if you want to collaborate with others though. Reviewing pull requests and engaging with a community is a lot of work and has possible legal ramifications; in many cases it’s faster to just do things yourself. Some teams/companies deliberately refuse outside contributions for this reason.

You can close them and limit discussion to contributors I guess? Not ideal but at least they wouldn’t appear in the pull requests tab.

Alternatively you can use a bot or a GitHub Action to automatically change the description and title of the pull request to something like “[PRs are not allowed and deleted automatically]”. But yeah not a perfect solution either…

I guess you could make a bot that closes any opened PR with a message that PRs are not accepted on Github and a link to the contribution docs.

Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore them.

As another poster noted, you can disable it by limiting all interactions (6 months at a time). It is not ideal, but it does work to for PRs. You should also close all current PRs when you do that so users cannot push to those branches as well.

PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.

This situation has a strong scam smell. Zig has many thousands of open issues on GitHub (nearly 3,500 issues) that appears ripe to get mostly ignored, closed without resolution, or plain disappear from public view. As pointed out, it is correct to shine a light on and review the situation of issues at Zig's GitHub.

The issues for this language are particularly and unlikely to be followed up on or re-posted at Codeberg. Deceptions or smoke screen claims, can trick the public and sponsors or create false impressions about how far away Zig is (after 9 plus years) from actually being production ready and reaching 1.0.

Not long back we were all urged to take CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md seriously. I've arrived at a place where the next thing I open source will include such a file which discusses not sending slop to the repository.

When the metrics becomes a target, ladida. GitHub profiles are utterly meaningless to me, speaking as someone that was hiring folks in 2023–4.

Perhaps we need an app to keep track of bad job candidates. We can gossip about them and such. I mean, we did that for an entire gender (sex?), let's go make a unicorn.

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