I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.
But deeper psychological issues are real, and gamification definitely pushes a certain agenda. When that agenda (in this case "streaks" and "commits per day") isn't really serving a community, it would be sensible for the community to tweak those rules. Putting some upper bound on them (for example, no "penalty" for missing days here and there, or stopping counting at some point) makes no difference to people "who don't care about it", but may make a positive difference to those people who care too much about it.
That seems very harsh.
These problems are quite common, hence the great success of free-to-play, extremely-gamified mobile apps. In many of those cases exploiting the most vulnerable users is the entire point, but not so for Github. So for Github to consider how they can maintain the interesting / fun / motivating (or irrelevant) aspect for most of their users, but temper the positive/negative reinforcements that some people may find literally addictive, it seems quite responsible.
So your misplaced value judgements, loaded language and dismissals aside... You realize that just because you might not value it, that it isn't being used to value you?
Lots of employers use github activity as a signal for hiring. And so making sure you can demonstrate very active participation in the community is often quite important to getting a job.
Even then, given that overwork seems to be something of an epidemic in the software industry and the entire industry is famously full of signals suggesting that a 60 hour work week is normal and reasonable (hell, somehow they decided that working on saturdays wasn't enough, now people say you need to work 8.5 hours every day to be "normal" and 11 hours a day is "crush")?
The signal and the reward for more work isn't healthy after some point. There is an environment around github that github has to consider.
https://zachholman.com/posts/streaks/
Personally, I find the contribution chart both motivating and frustrating. The contribution chart is enough of a signal that I try to make sure it looks healthy each week. But, at the same time, it's far from a perfect tool for assessing how productive I am, because commits come in all shapes and sizes. And like any gamified metric, it can lead to unhealthy obsessions.
Arguably anyone who falls for gamification has "a problem," to one degree or another. But if we know that certain personalities are more likely to have unhealthy obsessions with something, that's maybe a good reason to take it down, or at least lessen the focus on the "streak" and represent activity more positively without highlighting the gaps.
I appreciate the argument that burnout is more like depression, and should be approached with the same mindset. (i.e. simply taking time off of work might not cure it.)
But that's not really a valid counterpoint. One person's ability to have a 2-year Github streak is not evidence that burnout is just "in the mind," as he puts it. It just means that he's found a particularly sustainable balance. In fact, I'd argue that he's kind of an outlier. That 2-year streak would definitely not work for everyone.
What we commonly refer to as "burnout" can also surface with very physical symptoms. Blood pressure spikes, teeth grinding, weight loss or gain, physical exhaustion, even heart attacks. Maybe these symptoms are better attributed to stress or lack of exercise, but when they are a result of overwork and, more specifically, the compulsive need to work at a certain level despite all costs, that's burnout. It's not good and should not be taken lightly.
I also mentioned that this was a place that is widely regarded as a great employer. Most engineers would want to work there. It makes it really hard to say that the weird behavior of one recruiter is a good reason to pass, but at the same time, no one should have to put up with having their frequency of open source contribution questioned like that.
Edit - It is interesting without knowing intention people say to pass on the employeer. How many interviewers ask stupid questions not realizing they might miss out on a great hire? I think often companies forget that we are interviewing them as well. At any rate I think it's fair to ask in the interviewer why they are asking the question or what is their concern. Especially if the question already made you decide to turn down any offers.
And if they actually do care about seven day work-weeks being the norm, that's substantially worse.
(Interview ended shortly after I got a muddy reply about how hard it is to measure developer productivity, so they use the metrics they can find, etc. Textbook example of a drunk looking for their keys under the lamp post, which completely reaffirmed my decision.)
Nevertheless, I think there is a point in having a coarse activity indicator in order to assess how likely somebody is going to respond to issues or pull requests.
Hosting the stats directly on someone's profile landing page at GitHub is incredibly, hugely different and more problematic than if someone else aggregates it later and hosts it elsewhere.
the way I see it, it validates that I am capable of following simple directions and running a python script :3 that's got to be a valuable asset in an employee, right?
I don't care about the contribution streak, but do have friends who comment on theirs on Twitter now and then. I suppose it's just another thing to be proud of...
But, this is true whether you commit a few irrelevant lines manually or automatically. So if you're going to do it just for the sake of showing off, at least make it efficient, no? :P
No. But life for many people consists of more things than just software development.
Seems like it only encourages people who want to do programming outside of work.
We've already concluded that no one cares about your streak except yourself.
I'm paid to work on free software. In the last year, my Github profile shows a single commit on a weekend, when I made a pull request on a browser extension I use. I'd rather spend my weekend time away from computers :)
(The worker can ignore the 48 hour limit, but not the 24 hour break limit.)
> an adult worker is entitled to an uninterrupted rest period of not less than 24 hours in each seven-day period
The key word is "entitled", meaning that an employer cannot force them to work (or fire them if they don't work). The worker can choose to do whatever they want with their time, so long as they retain the right to exercise their legally permitted break.
It would be a very weird law to not allow a worker to do any work related to their job during their free time. Would that mean that a musician couldn't play music during their free time?
You still have the ability to quickly gauge how active someone is on GH, while allowing people who care about such things to keep a streak running without sacrificing weekend time.
But I got to thinking about the recent paper that was done analyzing contributions to repos on github [1] and thought that of that actual 10% of active users, there might be some with unhealthy tendencies.
I don't think that the contribution graph should be removed but I can see how it would be a net-negative to someone with those unhealthy tendencies.
So the post is definitely worth pondering over and not to be discarded.
I have reviewed multiple intern resumes in the past year and for sure anyone having a solid contribution graph on github would only have stepped up in the shortlist.
So to be dismissive about this issue is just not right.
Interesting deduction but it's extremely anecdotal and ultimately false. If history has taught us anything it's that people want to control their appearance to others. If there are rockstar developers with a huge contribution graph then people will start to associate that as a pattern to being a rockstar at which point it becomes a goal for people to shoot for.
Yes people shouldn't care. But they do. It's simply how the human mind works. While you say you don't care and you probably don't, I wouldn't be surprised if you cared even if it was just a very, very tiny bit even subconsciously.
This affects users of all social networks. People even develop eating disorders because they're worried about negative social evaluations[1].
In the interview process, we tend to worry about what we telegraph, and we should really spend more time worrying about what the other guy is telegraphing. For some of us it's hard to remember that anybody who thinks committing 7 days a week means you're a better person... isn't someone you want to hang around with anyway.
Rejection stings, even though being rejected by someone you objectively can't respect shouldn't hurt that much. We are human. If you prick us we bleed.