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Comment by nefitty

5 years ago

I’ve heard of people spamming readme commits to get their github graph green... I guess if an employer is tricked by something like this they are kinda asking for what they get.

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nefitty

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pop44  5 years ago

That’s a failure of imagination and evidence of having never read the Git manual pages, because the GitHub contribution graph respects commit time (which you absolutely can override), and it’s a trivial hour-long project to write messages on it. I had greenscale pixel rendering of images on the contribution graph working in about an hour, most of which was figuring out the heuristics for quantity in each cell (hint: it’s not as complex as you think).

I can’t understate the simplicity of doing it, and I’d be nervous about someone taking the other approach as indicative of their technical depth. Then again, they’re already spamming READMEs so it’s not as if it was a strong signal to start with.

  • renewiltord  5 years ago

    It's pretty easy, but if I'm looking at your Github to look at your work I can't find anything if you've clobbered your true history with a message.

    I don't ever see that as a negative signal, but I do see it as a positive signal if I can just read your code, so if you write good code in public and you hide it, I can't find it.

    Of course, whether you care is up to you, but if I find solid code there I'm going to recommend skipping technical evaluation if you're considering working with me.

    • ric2b  5 years ago

      All you need is a throwaway repo where you create all those commits to control the commit chart.

      It doesn't hide your work at all (commit frequency is an awful metric of valuable work, some people do a lot of "fix typo" commits).

DarkWiiPlayer  5 years ago

Any employer that looks at an applicants activity graph in any serious way only deserves the kind of people they will get.

Every employer worth working for will at least look at some actual code you've written, both in your own projects and in contributions to others.

And even then an in-person interview should be able to offset any github activity or lack thereof.

therealx  5 years ago

I once thought about making a script that automated git actions which would show you as active, but not actually do anything. Turns out theres too much real work to do to make it!