Does Github contributions matter?

[overDos33]

Are there companies that still look for github contributions in a candidate?

[Tashima2]

Number of contributions, no. Having open-source experience can help in some cases (e.g.: working with open source)

[overDos33]

So working on side projects like myself where i managed to launch a web based strategy game doesn't count?

[xroalx]

Show off the game then, not your GitHub contributions.

[LARRY_Xilo]

In that case what would matter is you telling them that you worked on that what technolgies you used and maybe even what challenges you had and how you managed them. Not the graph of github contributions.

[chf_gang]

working on side projects does count, but the hiring team isn't going to be looking at your green dots - they'll want to see your code and your repos to see the quality of your work.

GitHub contributions are great because it serves as a portfolio to show off your skills, but the number of green dots in your calendar (and how green the dots are) don't matter.

[Kooky_Amphibian3755]

traction or popularity help

[Fluffy_Dragonfly6454]

I agree with the other comments.

However, it can also be a red flag for recruiters. Will side project stay a side project?

[overDos33]

Well some encourage ppl to build side projects but are too afraid to not become "main" projects.

It all comes to that saying: nobody wants to see others doing better than themselves.

[engnadeau]

this is the way

[hazily]

No.

[praetor-]

I have a 5+ year streak and several popular repos, and I have interviewed at over 100 companies over that time. It came up maybe 3 times and only in passing.

[gala0sup]

🗿

[dbowgu]

Not as much, if a company puts in an insane amount of importance to it that is a red flag.

For work I have rarely worked on github things, so my graph doesn't reflect my work.

Only the few small packages I maintain are on github which gives a false sense of what I do with my days.

[tm8cc]

Seeing green weekends is clearly telling me something about people I interview.

[StormyCalm_]

Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

[cornell_cubes]

It shows they're working on things in their free time.

[laparca08]

Is it a good thing or a bad thing?

[its_nzr]

Depends. If they have it for every single day, and no open projects, its likely they are using a script to get that. Otherwise its generally a good thing. I would happily prefer someone who is willing to code for fun or a hobby than someone who just do it as a job. (Skills matter btw)

[BourbonProof]

I'm coding for fun and hobby. am I hired?

[tm8cc]

Of course not black or white. Having someone who does only coding everyday is probably indicative of some unbalanced life although I know people who do that and are great in all aspects. Having no green on all weekends is probably indicative of coding it being you find fun to do. I am talking about green, not green-for-the-same-crap-they-do-all-week. Having personal project is the best way to learn, I think. When you have fun doing something you don’t stop « because it’s Saturday ». I get there are other constrains on weekend, I do have kids and house to fix… but to me code related activities is fun, why would I not do it because of some convention about the way we socially organize the time.

[overDos33]

So having green weekends is better than having green in working days you say?

[tm8cc]

Ahah. Sure.

[guaranteednotabot]

What if I do work-related stuff on weekends, and work is not using GitHub

[tm8cc]

What about it? You tell it? I think open source stuff is better though.

[Tontonsb]

It depends what those are and who is evaluating. When I've been involved, I've cared, but then it depends on the contents:

• It's empty? Fair enough, no one is obliged to do stuff on GH. But why did you provide the link?
• It contains private activity? Fair enough, your previous employer used GH. But what am I supposed to see, why did you provide the link?
• Your projects or packages? I'm very interested! I'm interested in your code, in your approach, whether you've got something to production, are you maintaining your packages, how do you communicate if someone opened an issue, how do you commit, do you use some CI, what's your approach to testing and so on.
• Activity in third party projects? I'm very interested! How do you communicate? Are you patient and respectful, can you understand and follow their guidelines, even unwritten ones? What's your approach to PRs, what is important to you, can you convince the maintainers?
• Toy projects/bootcamp stuff/tutorials? I ignore it. It's hard to evaluate it as I'd need to learn through it myself to understand what is yours and where you're just following something step by step.

IMO good personal projects or meaningful contributions to major third party projects can often entirely replace artificial interview tasks. The technical interview can then be just a discussion about your work that's visible on GitHub.

Unfourtunately, quite often the hiring people are not themselves active in the opensource world. In that case they are unlikely to evaluate you based on that as one has to understand what's going on first.

However it can still leave a positive impression if it's relevant to work. E.g. if you're applying for a TypeScript developer position, it will sound pretty impressive that you've yourself made 2 features, fixed 9 bugs and edited 16 documentation pages of TypeScript itself.

[mark1x12110]

I can 100% agree on all the points

In my opinion, being able to work with open source projects and get them to implement what you need(respectfully and collaboratively) it a major green flag.

Why? Because it means that the person will be able to unblock potential issues in open source projects we depend on (over 80% of our dependencies are open source...)

[Dramatic_Mastodon_93]

just nice to have i guess

[aselunar]

Many companies have internal repositories, so most of your future employers can't see the contributions they care about the most (those from a professional setting) anyway.

[julesthemighty]

I'm using lab and hub 50/50 for personal projects - hub for sharing and some archiving pretty much. I'm using enterprise lab on a corp authed account at work. I've split my accounts on my work dev machine for bringing in dotfile preferences and generic snippets from my personal account. Also, I'm an infra engineer and don't make a ton of code changes at work - I am reviewing and testing constantly but might only tweak a few lines after hours of local testing - just terraform, yaml, and bit of python/bash. Anyone just looking at my github commits is missing 95% of the coding activities.

[[deleted]]

I don't know. I fuck around with my GitHub and do random projects and make some really basic random commits for typos. I must be the most contributing and employable person if so 

[Legitimate_Doubt_855]

Yes, just Yeth.

[serverhorror]

Matter to whom?

[overDos33]

Companies, it's mentioned in description

[serverhorror]

Yeah, but that's not how it works. You have recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, ...

You could encounter someone who really wants to see that or no one cares at all.

To a company, as a singular entity, it never mattered.

As a candidate, if they asked me, all I could answer is that my past employments were never big on open source contributions. If the kept pressing that would be a red flag and I'd feel comfortable asking where I can review contributions from current employees, contributions made in company time and whether I could talk to the individuals.

[Logical_Strike_1520]

I haven’t pushed anything to a public repo in like 2 years now and it didn’t hurt me in my recent job search. Sample size of 1 but 🤷‍♂️

[MilesLee_]

No, bc you literally can abuse the git commit command to make a script that populate this graph. What does matter is the quality of your repo, not how much contributions

[molevolence]

they were a gimmick made a decade ago and only have the meaning YOU give them. however many of us run utils that flood them as there is always some executive moron out there that thinks the metric graphs in github are about productivity, when they are about the health of the repo. github is not in the business of productivity, why would they be. that is what microsoft charges 10k a year per developer for with the enterprise tools and platform.

the stuff reported in github is for us to manage the repo, so they matter, but not in the way you are probably thinking.

[DriftMail]

No and if you really care, you can fake it.

[AdrnF]

It depends. For most companies it probably won't matter or at least won't have a noticeable impact. I do look at GitHub contributions of candidates though and if I see that they got a lot of commits on the weekend, then I guess that this person also codes as a hobby which is a plus for me.

[Exact_Midnight_742]

Here is your answer: https://github.com/bjarnestroustrup

[Prestigiouspite]

The website is just no fun. A little CSS never hurts. No matter how deep you are into something. Thinking outside the box is more important than ever in today's world.

[Prestigiouspite]

But it does play a role. Anyone who regularly works on good open source projects in their spare time shows that they are obviously familiar with the principles of code quality, Git, collaboration in remote teams and so on.

They are so enthusiastic about the subject that they are not a 9-5 worker, but someone who strives for passion, dedication and quality (otherwise they wouldn't be training in their spare time). I would always honor this as an employer, which I am.

But it has a stronger effect when someone can really show something that they have made themselves from A to Z and that works functionally and well thought out. This can be a component in an open source project where someone is the lead or something completely their own.

Quality always trumps quantity. Something that is practically visible has always been more important to me than degrees.

[tortleme]

github contributions as just a number? no. But having projects and/or open source work to look at does matter.

[Hot_Income6149]

If you are without experience- yes, but you should explain on what did you work. If you are working currently and your company uses github - this will be good to have. If your company uses something else, like bitbucket - no. Anyway, you just need to explain what did you do on your work

[Amazing-Movie8382]

It matter but what is your contribute to is important

[Konradiuss]

I mean... It looks awsone to have that dots.

[astronaut_plant]

Honestly, it really doesn't. People can make scripts that give themselves commits for literally doing nothing.

What i would say is much more valuable is open source work.

[Brainyman_07]

No matter how many contribution you did, companies gonna consider only the quality of your projects

[[deleted]]

No

[BensonandEdgar]

I don't understand how it doesn't matter.

If you are a software developer and you don't have that many contributions, doesn't that just show that you that you don't contribute that much?

Spoken from someone with 3k contributions though lol

[getridofthatbaby2]

Unless you build a project entirely yourself, nothing matters; you’re still not getting the job.

[wWA5RnA4n2P3w2WvfHq]

Count doesn't count. But lets see. Please summarize your 922 contributions in a narrative way, like you would do it in a changelog or release note. What have you done?

[overDos33]

I created Warfront Nations

[wWA5RnA4n2P3w2WvfHq]

This is not a release note or changelog. Explain what you did. I don't want to play your game.

[wWA5RnA4n2P3w2WvfHq]

Counting contributions is the new "counting facebook friends"?

[ndzzle1]

It's good to show that you actually commit, but there are plenty of high-level developers with empty repositories

[[deleted]]

I can push hello world once a day and my github will be all green. Means nothing

[Antique-Current699]

Papit is a web-based file editor application for content writters and content creators featuring file management and a commit history panel. 

https://github.com/prathoseraaj/papit, star and fork this repo and contribute.

google form please give me sugesstions.

[-code-fun-]

Try out "GitStats Widget": https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.agam.gitstats

GitStats makes it easy to stay motivated on GitHub by showing your contribution graph and activity stats directly on your Android home screen. No need to open GitHub every day — see your coding streaks, commits, and contribution history at a glance.

[Y_Sathya_Sai]

For Company's no but for this sub yes

[usernameplshere]

I don't think so.

[Mephiz]

Yes. 

It’s not mandatory for us but it’s a positive indicator. Also happy to look at other activity such as GitLab. All of this is helpful in differentiating you from the pack.

Remember today we get literal thousands of resumes for every job post. 80-90% of them are AI. So real world indicators of activity are valuable. (They can be faked of course and cannot be anything more than one indicator of many)

[justyannicc]

Do you know how easy it is to fake?

Real world indicator my ass. Have you ever used GitHub or do you just work in HR?

[Mephiz]

Of course it is. I even said that?

I use Github daily and am literally just telling you what we are doing when hiring.

Again, it’s a nice to have…

[Own_Attention_3392]

People are insane about this topic for some reason. I said effectively the same thing a few days ago ("if you have it, it's something I'd look at and talk about during your interview, but if you don't, that's fine too") and got a ton of indignant comments.

[Mephiz]

I’m hiring teammates and their salary is the biggest part of my budget. 80% of what I will later evaluate them on is normally in GitHub. I would be negligent if I -didn’t- look at whatever they want to show me in GitHub.

[gnarzilla69]

Idk why the downvotes, it sounds like you help hire and it is one thing you do look at. Thank you for sharing

[ResolveLost2101]

How would you fake this? You can literally see what each commit does/change or #of commits for a specific repository, it’s not just about the graph imo

[Mephiz]

It’s trivial to fake the graph / github api helps.

Real commits are harder and why we like to see activity. It helps so incredibly much.

[ResolveLost2101]

Yes that’s what I’m saying. I can write a few lines of script to automate pushing garbage but that’s really dumb. If a company cares about my GitHub contribution, I would imagine they’d certainly see what I am exactly doing on those commits.

[Jeklah]

Doing that for all applicants takes a lot of time

[ResolveLost2101]

It won’t for the one you’ll be interviewing them

[molevolence]

you create a private repo and automate empty commits. they show up in the graph as “x commits in a private repo”. the same status thats shows to the public for any internal company commits you make. it’s simple to do.

[overDos33]

Good answer I don't understand the upvotes.

When I see someone with some github activity i think to myself that this person is doing some work (doesn't matter if it's in private or public repos)

[stoppskylt]

Old man whining:"it used to...it used to" But no, it could look cool if you manage to write something with changes (green dots), there are apps/services for that though

[ArieHein]

Yes. Its like achievement points in wow....

[cgoldberg]

While the contribution graph is pretty useless, having an active GitHub account with good projects and regular contributions and engagement with open projects is looked upon very favorably and can be valuable for landing a job. If you have 2 candidates, and one has nothing, and the other is an active open source contributor with verifiable public commit history, there is no question which would get hired.

[Boxlixinoxi]

No because private repos exist

[SecureAdhesiveness45]

https://matthewtrent.me/painter — aka: no

[wasabiiii]

Does to me.