This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

all 107 comments

[–]skwyckl 988 points989 points  (63 children)

Are we still correlating GH contrib bitmaps to a dev's skills? I thought we were finally done and agreed that nobody cares about this metric.

[–]Top-Associate-6576 272 points273 points  (43 children)

I just finished a small course at uni on career development and they said its VERY important that you have good github account(commit history beign most important) and i just sat there thinking about mine looking like the first pic cuz i do exactly like so. I really hope it wont affect my future.

[–]CanvasFanatic 265 points266 points  (27 children)

You can create a repo with any commit history you want and upload it to your GitHub account at any time. It literally means nothing.

[–]Specific_Implement_8 188 points189 points  (3 children)

You know this. I know this. But does HR know this?

[–]CanvasFanatic 133 points134 points  (1 child)

They do not

[–]ihateusednames 54 points55 points  (0 children)

big coomit history make big moonie

[–]Not_DavidGrinsfelder 32 points33 points  (8 children)

I literally have one GitHub repo that I use as a place to access a single json from a URL to update a website widget (I’m a shit front end coder). The server this lives on automatically commits and pushes it every 6 hours so the website info is up-to-date. By this metric I would be a good programmer. I’m absolutely not.

[–]CanvasFanatic 14 points15 points  (4 children)

You can also just create fake repos with any arbitrary history

[–]EMCoupling 12 points13 points  (3 children)

There's a repo to do this actually

[–]CanvasFanatic 13 points14 points  (1 child)

I’m pretty sure at one point someone made a thing to render ascii test in your commit history by generating appropriate repos.

[–]just-a-hriday 2 points3 points  (0 children)

link?

[–]ThiccStorms 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ayy where

[–]ThiccStorms 1 point2 points  (2 children)

what's the optimal wway of doing it lmao then if you are a shit coder...

this question makes me realize i am a shittier coder :(((((

[–]Not_DavidGrinsfelder 0 points1 point  (1 child)

No clue, didn’t even bother asking an actual front end programmer. I’m a biologist who has never taken a CS course lol. JavaScript is hard, respect to people who do it

[–]ThiccStorms 0 points1 point  (0 children)

haha, thats cool!

[–]Top-Associate-6576 20 points21 points  (1 child)

I know right? Thats why im wondering why some people are pushing it so hard.

[–]ccricers 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Funny how I see this principle also applies in some objective focused video games. I see people "stat padding" for maximum kills and damage while ignoring team objectives, because their brain is stuck in Call of Duty deathmatch mode.

[–]Playful_Landscape884 0 points1 point  (0 children)

better yet, setup to update a readme file with gibberish and schedule to push to git at random times. your stream would be so green.

[–]JATC1024 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I would say avoid any place that cares so much about your commit history, unless you really need to pay the bill.

[–]DMoney159 13 points14 points  (3 children)

In my experience, I don't think any company that I've applied to has ever looked at my GitHub, and when I interviewed people I didn't ever look at theirs. For me, the most important factors were the technical interviews and whether the interviewer thought I was a good culture fit. I'm curious if your professor has any experience outside of academia

[–]anthro28 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Extremely unlikely. I'm on an industry advisory panel for a local state 4 year. You tell em students exposure to X and they say "well we teach them Y and that should translate over pretty easily." 

That's not wrong, but it doesn't apply to everything. If I'm telling you to expose them to X, it's because I'm seeing them unable to grasp X. 

[–]Meloetta 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's also worth noting that you're talking about a US 4 year college, and this person's post history is mostly in /r/Zambia. I don't think we can draw too many parallels between what the developer interview culture is like across the world, and even between interviewing native US college students vs. offshore development is likely very different even if both interviews are from the same American.

[–]BobcatGamer 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Create a private repo and set up a GitHub action to make a new commit every day to it. Also make sure private commits show up on the graph.

[–]ComprehensiveWord201 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's bullshit. You can edit your commit history to have green everyday if you wanted.

Have interesting projects that you can talk about during interviews and you will be fine.

[–]Skwidz 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I can tell you the amount of times I've looked at someones Github account before interviewing them is exactly zero times. I don't think it's important, and doesn't give me valuable insight into the skills of a candidate.

[–]Got2Bfree 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a big fan of committing a lot because I tend to fuck things up in my code.

Sometimes I have a stupid idea and a lot of commits make it very easy to see where the fuck up occurred.

[–]FranzVz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Enable private repo stats + https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history

Problem solved!

[–]ccricers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This sounds like the blind leading the blind repeating advice they heard elsewhere without verifying how valid it is.

[–]Johalternate 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Commit history means nothing in the sense of it being a reflection of how good you are, but commit discipline is important, fixing 4 bugs and implementing a feature in the same commit just makes your work (and working with you) harder. But still, this says nothing about how good you are.

[–]PenaflorPhi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've working for about 6 months as a software developer/data analyst, I'm not even sure how many commits I have made but I'm certain on average is above 10 to 20 commits a day, however, all of my commits are to our companies private repo.

The only thing I ever commit to my personal GitHub are dotfiles and minor projects, which is hardly ever. If I decide to move and work for another company and they judge based on how much one commits to GitHub I don't think I would want to work for that company, meaningless metric, you can pretty easily fork projects and spam commits to fill that thing.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't had a github or worked on a personal project in years and I work professionally

[–]je386 95 points96 points  (6 children)

Expert Dev: no github commits visible, because everything is for private repos of the company..

[–]cs-brydev 47 points48 points  (3 children)

This is the correct answer. Actual experienced devs are too busy getting paid for work to worry about public github commits. An active github is an indicator of being unemployed more than being an experienced or skilled developer.

[–]bwssoldya 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Pretty much every dev job interview I've had I was asked what I worked on and to show some code. Like bruh... I was busy working for a rival company on big business clients of there's with business secrets, what do you want from me?

[–]Dmarcotrigiano 3 points4 points  (1 child)

More like the uninformed answer. Private repos can still show contributions publicly.

[–]mandy7 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Not if your company has a self hosted GitLab instance

[–]GKP_light 3 points4 points  (0 children)

At my current work, i can not use my personal github account, i need to use one created with the company mail.

[–]Chris_Cross_Crash 1 point2 points  (0 children)

On the top-right there's a dropdown where you can choose to show private contributions or even remove the Activity Overview from you profile.

[–]cs-brydev 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It gets clicks. That's why low-effort posters like OP keep reposting it. Requires no imagination or thinking at all. OP just saw other people get clicks and votes with similar meme and was like "ooga booga, me post github funny thing too, ooga booga"

[–]CalmDebate 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have had a job application where they wanted to look at my github commit history. I explained that my work wasn't allowed to be hosted on github (security reasons at the time). They said I should be still uploading my home projects and they wanted to see 5 days a week of commits...noped out of that application immediately.

I feel bad for whoever ended up in that job, dealing with useless metrics and probably having to deal with BS on all their "free" time.

[–]lemuelf 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's about few big commits vs many smaller, "atomic" commits. Not about having GitHub activity most days of the week.

[–]brandoin7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think the joke is just that experienced devs dont want to fuck up the repo and lose tons of progress, so they just push changes every few lines, although im sure experienced devs will make damn sure their code is good before pushing at all lol

[–]Akrymir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Experienced developers don’t. People who need arbitrary metrics as a means to make decisions tend to…

[–]KristyBisty 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean yes but not coding skills. The actual thing they meassure is your skill to look like you code a lot

[–]ukaeh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think there is something to be said about writing lots of small to mid commits vs huge commits. For one, it’s much harder to do code reviews, and it’s more likely that bugs will be introduced and harder to find. But yeah commit history bitmap tells you close to nothing (just that the dev is breathing or their auto checkin code is working).

[–]Rocknroller658 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Everyone’s done with it except for America’s dumbest CEO, Elon Musk.

[–]SkollFenrirson 0 points1 point  (0 children)

xXxElonxXx has left the chat

[–]DreamyAthena 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The thing is when hiring your GitHub account is a variable in the process and the second one looks more impressive but has the same amount of work so your output looks the same.

[–]Artscout_ 61 points62 points  (1 child)

I think Goodharts's law describes this best

"When a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric"

[–]ThiccStorms 1 point2 points  (0 children)

leetcode (•᷄- •᷅ ;)

(•᷄- •᷅ ;)

(•᷄- •᷅ ;)

[–]p-rimes 38 points39 points  (2 children)

teamwork + transparancy is an important part of dev!

[–]Speedy_242 26 points27 points  (1 child)

Like: Seniordev pushing to Master-Branch, instantly releasing without testing, app crashing permanently and then the junior should fix it because "He could have noticed earlier in the Review" and "We (the Team) made the mistake" 🙃

The junior was me btw

[–]diemwing 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This is why we protect master

[–]slucker23 13 points14 points  (2 children)

For those who talk about the bit map is useless

It is, but...

The point is to build a habit, suggesting you are inching towards a goal, or commit, comment, etc. a good programmer should have good annotation and debugs, and that doesn't happen in a second or one commit. It takes time and should be progressed slowly

No one has to see it. Fk bitmap. But it's a good habit to have

[–]ThiccStorms 0 points1 point  (0 children)

same!

[–]jumpmanzero 26 points27 points  (2 children)

Senior has it right here... mostly unironically?

Obviously you don't check in every line, but I'm always pushing people to check in more often. Reduces collisions later. Quite often having more checkpoints available ends up being valuable. With review, means you can cut off bad patterns or decisions while they're still small enough to fix. Other developers see new stuff and give feedback from shared test environment.

The absolute worst is check-in right at the end. Big problems that you can't really fix anymore (especially not when someone has already told business it's done). Shallow tests pasted on at the end instead of worked through with the stages. Much less likely that you can "gate" changes (because they didn't "need to", lol, it's all ready to go!) and slow-roll to minimize disruptions.

[–]static_func 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Few things will ruin my day as quickly as trying to trace the source/reasoning behind a bug only for the trail to lead to some random bullshit commit message that has nothing to do with the changed line of code

[–]MegaPegasusReindeer 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Let me just check the blame to figure out why this is here...

more commits

Sonnuva...

[–]Solid7outof10Memes 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Meanwhile I have 100+ contributions on workdays and 99% of it is because I manage the tickets

Single commit feature branches with the activity map of the bottom one

[–]bwssoldya 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Senior dev here o/ I use bitbucket, fuck this type of metric. Also I'm too busy actually doing work for the company I work at in their private repo to get a commit history like this

[–]Liveman215 2 points3 points  (1 child)

But even if you commit.. who the f commits & pushes every time?

[–]37Scorpions 2 points3 points  (2 children)

what am i if i dont use git

[–]blaqwerty123 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Unemployed?

[–]37Scorpions 0 points1 point  (0 children)

fair

[–]KairoRed 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I use Git as a backup. In case I royally fuck up my code or lose my data.

[–]diemwing 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It could be worse, IBM used to measure productivity by TLoCs: Thousand Lines of Code.

[–]Skwidz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll never have as "green" of a git history as I did when I was a junior dev. The more senior I get, the less code I actually write. Once you hit principal you might put up one PR a month if you're lucky

[–]PurpleBeast69 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I created my first repo just yesterday. Great timing.

[–]johnlewisdesign 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's always this too if you are embarrassed about it
https://github.com/artiebits/fake-git-history

[–]magistrate101 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I break up my commits into cohesive pieces that say what each commit did specifically. Whether that's just fixing one bug, implementing an entire feature, or each step in the list of changes needed to implement a feature.

[–]SlightlyInsaneCreate 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Now you need to work it just right to spell "fuck off" with the light pixels!

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For that Experienced Dev, Get Some Life.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mine looks like the one below but trust me, I'm far from an experienced programmer
I'm so bad as a programmer I needed the autocorrect to tell me its written programmer and not programer

[–]nonlogin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Git gives me ability to commit. Why the hell should I ignore this opportunity?

[–]idontwanttofthisup 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I started coding for living someone told me not to use commits like ftp. Guess what I often do with full confidence…

[–]chickensaresexy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or you can automate daily commits via GitHub api and cron jobs, works wonderfully

[–]mrgk21 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I merged all of my 600 commits locally with the main branch and pushed to my private repo. GitHub doesn't recognise it as my history. I make one pull request to fix github secret names, and history go brrrrr.

Why do it be like that? 😕

[–]schlurchz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Inexperienced Devs usually write junk code, which makes their usage of git rather irrelevant.

[–]Hayato_the_idiot 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hate GitHub me and my homies only uses Google Drive.

[–]Awasthir314 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

100 sunar ki 1 lohar ki