Hacker News Reader

Comment by popcorncowboy | Hacker News Reader

This is not stupid. It's not a waste of time. It doesn't matter if this leads to a proliferation of shit contributions. It doesn't matter if it encourages bad practices. It doesn't matter if you don't like it.

It's smart.

This is WHY Microsoft bought Github. Software is eating the world and Github is where most of the eating happens. There are many career paths that require you to live on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever. If Github pulls off the bigger play here it won't matter what Gitlab or Bitbucket or anyone else ever tries because you will HAVE to be on Github.

This is how a trillion dollar company gets its return on GH.

View on HN

You've hit the nail on the head. Most people (at least in my social circles) don't like Linkedin, but are on the platform all the same. If an external service becomes the go-to validation for one metric or another, people will use it to try and get an edge, and eventually it means that you need to play the game to get your foot in the door. As an anecdotal example, I once didn't hear back after applying for a role, and when I sent them a followup email they said they didn't think I was a real person because I wasn't on Linkedin. Cue me now being on Linkedin.

Given that Stack Overflow has shut down their (very popular) jobs board along with the relevant developer profiles [0], this seems like a great time for Github to try and grab a part of the pie.

[0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...

Precisely. LinkedIn doesn't specialize in software, it's a glorified résumé database. We all know that résumés don't really tell you whether an engineer is going to do good work for you; if they did, the only purpose of engineering interviews would be for culture fit. At the same time, even if all of an engineer's contributions were fully in the open and linked to from their GitHub profile, it's all a bit too much for a hiring manager to parse per résumé that they receive.

Achievements is a way of distilling contributions down to the important questions that hiring managers have: just how senior is this person I'm interviewing anyway? If I hire this person to do cutting-edge work, are they the kind of person to interact with the community on pushing the state-of-the-art, or not?

I think you are riding a horse that is driven by a cart :D.

Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users. If the feature does not seem to serve them, it might not be a good one.

If github is a tool, then the words hiring manager probably shouldn't appear. I don't think of "what will my product person think?" when I use grep.

Also, didn't we do this when the award was tshirts for commits to open source projects where it unleashed a firestorm of junk edits to projects?

If SNR gets low enough, people will migrate. I know some people have left github for gitlab, and are having a whale of a time with their runners etc. Replacing junky old jenkins installs for in the fence CICD.

> look at it from the perspective of users

It sounds like your perspective is that users don't get any value out of social media?

Why do people post photos to Instagram? Why post updates to Facebook?

You can take photos for your own benefit (like writing code for some non-GitHub-related benefit, e.g. work) and also share them on social media for your own gratification. You can live life for the fun of it and also share it on social media for your own gratification. (leave aside that social media is net-toxic, it's still worth it to understand the motivations of those who engage with social media).

Don't want to engage with the social media aspects of GitHub that they're adding (because social media is net-toxic)? Fine. Disable the achievements. They (smartly) built in that disable switch. But don't presume that there isn't a large portion of GitHub's userbase that won't get value out of this.

> Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users.

Why? Everybody I've talked to who's considered alternatives and still uses GitHub for projects that don't have to be on GitHub does it because they're looking at it from the perspective of potential employers. (Or because they like GitHub's Projects feature enough, but those are rarer.)

People can already showcase and get credit for their contributions on GitHub. Badges are noise.

What do you think happens after GitHub earns a reputation for alienating OSS project leaders by incentivizing low-quality contributions?

This is yet another short-sighted and stupid decision towards making GitHub into the next SourceForge.

I'm quite conflicted with this; while I agree that it's a smart move in terms of forcing user engagement, I think it sucks that Github is and seemingly will continue to be THE Git platform. I'd argue that other platforms such as Gitlab and even Azure DevOps provide a better overall experience, especially when it comes to CI/CD, so it's a little sad that the battle for users seems to be going into the 'social features' territory rather than improved user experience.

I think the strategy's reasonable from a "right tool for the job" standpoint. The key to product differentiation is, you know, differentiation; if GitLab wants to differentiate with a rich CI/CD experience while GitHub wants to differentiate with a rich social/collaboration experience, then great! I can push my code to both pretty trivially, so it seems reasonable to use both for what they're respectively good at.

It's either that or it's how a billion dollar company destroys its acquisition and has to write it down.

To me, this strategy was the right one 5+ years ago and Microsoft is behind the trends.

I see this backfiring if they push it too hard.

it made me quit github, looks like you guys are visionary ;)

well said

Reply on news.ycombinator.com