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Ask HN: What’s your reaction if MS made GitHub stats available to recruiters?

16 points by codeisawesome ↗ HN
Before I could login to GitHub today, I had to check some features they are trying to sell, and there’s more distracting links than usual I feel, since the news of acquisition.

As Microsoft now owns LinkedIn and GitHub, I have a feeling that they will provide an opt-in way of signaling your productivity to Recruiters - finally monetising that green dot chart on your profile.

What’s the community’s feelings on such a possibility?

17 comments

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johncoltrane
Putting a GitHub link in our resume/profile is already a way for us to low key monetize that chart, and how many repos we have, and how many stars we have. Turning that link into a widget that says "Very active in $FOO, $BAR, and $BAZ" would probably be helpful when bargaining for a raise or discussing your base salary at $NEW_EMPLOYER.

It already works like that on Stack Overflow Careers and, indeed, being in the top 0.1% on a couple of specific tags happens to be quite the shortcut.

codeisawesome
That last statement is super interesting! One that I “knew” but didn’t really think about before.
Piskvorrr
First opt-in, then opt-out, our-way-or-the-highway next. As usual. Fortunately, emigrating from Github is not entirely hard, if that were to happen. (Yes, I feel the need for a disclaimer "this is all speculative"; alas)
ken
Moving a git repo is easy, but have you found any "not entirely hard" way to export Issues from GitHub? All I've found so far is essentially "here's an API, build it yourself".
na85
If you're relying on issues for documentation, I would suggest you are misusing that tool and should focus on writing good documentation instead.

If you aren't relying on issues for documentation, what of value is being lost?

tomjen3
You have a history of the discussion about how the problem was solved, right? That is pretty valuable, should something similar come up again.
na85
Why wouldn't that be in commit messages, documentation, or a FAQ?
avian
That green dot chart on your profile is trivial to fake:

https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

codeisawesome
True... this would be a major barrier in convincing tech teams to take it seriously. Still, there’s a potential of this being used (recruiters may not care), and they could make it a T.O.S violation to do that...
diydsp
I don't use github, so it would put me at a disadvantage.
cbanek
It's just yet another way desperate uninformed recruiters will find me and unsuccessfully attempt to recruit me. Sadly, none of them send me an Oculus like they did for Gilfoyle.
zzo38computer
I do not use GitHub for any of my own projects. (And I have not seen any such distracting links; maybe they are only visible if you login)
codeisawesome
Hmm, possible. I couldn’t login until I clicked through to read the marketing about Features on this particular instance (not browse anything else - maybe I was a target of A/B testing).
tomjen3
I don't use GitLab, but I would love to have any publicly known metric to get good jobs -- because then I can code myself a minivan, by hacking the metrics.
zackboe
Already public info? Indifferent. It's already scraped (and then leaked) by so many parties as is.