Judging developers by GitHub contributions
The main image for this article shows all my GitHub contributions for the past year (roughly April 2023 through March 2024). Check it out. 
Notice anything?
.
My contributions pretty much stopped around August 2023.
.
Why?
.
That’s when I changed jobs.
Until July 2023, all my professional coding work went into open source repositories in GitHub. After changing jobs, all my professional coding work went into closed source repositories in Azure DevOps.
Did I suddenly stop coding at that time? No. In fact, I did more coding – and arguably more serious development work – at the second job.
Tech social media periodically explodes with posts saying how developers who don’t have walls of solid green GitHub tiles aren’t “serious” about their work. How the folks writing these posts wouldn’t hire developers who don’t have enough green tiles. How any developer worth their salt should regularly contribute to open source projects outside of their 9-5 job. These posts are sometimes sarcastic, but they are, unfortunately, all too often sincere – and you can’t always tell.
These posts are rubbish. It is foolish to judge a developer by the number of GitHub contributions they make. Sure, it can be a helpful data point when reviewing someone’s body of work, but it is merely one data point. Someone’s lack of green tiles should not justify putting them down. It should not immediately disqualify them as a candidate from a job opening. Not everyone’s work involves open source contributions to a particular hosting site. Not everyone’s life permits extra work-like work outside of work, especially for zero pay.
Open source contributions are a great way to give back to the software community as well as to build up one’s skills. It’s also a great way to show one’s work publicly. But please, don’t fall for the trolling – either for the flame wars or for the insinuations of inadequacy. There are plenty of talented individuals who don’t have a wall of solid green tiles to “prove” their skills, myself included.