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Comment by jinnovation | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you're opposed to the gamification; care to explain why? I'm curious.

The biggest problem is that gamification tends to provide incentives to improve your efficiency in affecting the "game" portion, to the detriment of the actual thing being scored. As the game becomes more popular, the game becomes what is important.

that's a flaw in the design of a particular the game and not a flaw of gamification itself. What if you could only be rewarded by doing things properly? By trying to affect the outcome of the game you will be improving how you do things normally.

Isn't it right there in his comment? Seems that he doesn't like the idea of having to work for free to "rank higher" if recruiters start to use these sorts of scores. Since no other profession has to work for free like this(see: the carpenter analogy), it seems a reasonable position.

It's already started, right? "Github is your resume" is often said; which sucks for those of us who work on enterprise software and private repos that can't be open sourced.

All kudos to those that can spare the time for, make their livelihood on, or have their company allow them to release, open source software.

I want to be like you, but unfortunately cannot.

> Since no other profession has to work for free like this

This is untrue, though. The concept of building a portfolio exists across all creative domains, and almost everyone builds that portfolio initially by doing the work for its own sake.

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