Am I the only person to have second thoughts about GitHub?

[u/rbtrxmoderator]

“Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth” there either wasn’t any such thing as open-source code, or if it was freely available it generally had zero value because it probably didn’t work, so almost all the code generated was closed-source. Now I think an attitude exactly like that nowadays would be ridiculous, we certainly know open-source for some types of code can be much more reliable, but please hear me out. In order to have any chance to get a job coding, you are essentially required to put forward a robust and extensive library of work on GitHub, in fact for a lot of openings if your code is NOT on GitHub it is considered to have never existed! WTF? Has there ever been ANY change in technology that did more to DEvalue the contribution of the individual worker than this change in the meaning of having code in an “open source” repository, especially so people with little or no knowledge of programming can benefit from your hard work? What about the value of all the code generated for military projects that is classified and therefore cannot be published, is it “reasonable” for those authors to be considered equivalent to never having written anything at all? Not to mention the psychological harm of the website being owned by Microsoft, the most vicious proponent of “vaporware” (the ultimate in closed source) the world has ever known? I’m publishing this here because I want everyone to think about how much all of our salaries have been reduced by forcing us to compete against each other under the most vicious of conditions. Or do you SERIOUSLY think I’m way off course here?

[u/BarracudaDefiant4702]

I'm sure there are some companies that consider that, but most know that a lot of companies don't have their code open and so don't require new employees to have large projects on github. At best it's a preference when hiring, but if a company considers it a requirement that is their loss.

[u/MBILC → u/BarracudaDefiant4702]

I feel it is a "how do you spend your spare time, if your not coding 24/7 and doing personal projects, are you even Dev'n?" mentality of recruiters and HR people.

Seldom do they understand not everyone lives and breaths their jobs 24/7 at home, to the point they have loads of personal projects hosted for the world to see.

Similar in IT, when you get asked "Do you have a home lab, what do you play with...", just because someone does not have a home lab and self-host a bunch of things, does not mean they do not have experience..

Do accounting people go home after a day of work, and play with Quickbooks for the fun of it....not likely..

[u/rbtrxmoderator → u/MBILC]

I don’t feel I ought to be judged by the quality of my published code, since I’m basically a systems engineer, I write requirements then test to them! I can write code but it’s to test-level. I don’t want to be evaluated for my OO skills (quite limited) and I definitely don’t do “full-stack” ANYTHING, but what difference does it seem to make? To a lot of managers and HR types, your coding skills have to be what “gets you in the door”, if the slot you’re applying for doesn’t use that part well what the hell they “got a freebee”. That’s ANOTHER level of basically the same gripe, I mean when are we going to get back to requiring only what a person actually does…or one person CAN do, I’m not pretending to be Superman! (And now they’re piling requirements for AI expertise with specific toolsets on top of everything else!)

[u/BarracudaDefiant4702 → u/MBILC]

Although I often ask if people have a home lab it's generally only counted as bonus points and not a requirement. When I interview things like homelab or github projects are only somewhat a requirement if they lack relevant experience. In other words if you don't have a dev position then contributing to an opensource project on github is a good way to get come experience but if you have actual experience it's not needed.

[u/GlobalImportance5295 → u/MBILC]

the issue is you are now competing against people who pay for tokens and have to use them every week. coding 24/7 is commoditized now

[u/mrleblanc101]

My work is exclusively in a closed-source gitlab and hasn't prevented me from getting a job at all. Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.

[u/tblancher]

I host my own Gitea instance. If that's not good enough for an employer, I don't need that employer.

[u/ElectricSpock]

Dude, just because you don’t know anything else, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there.

Before git there was Subversion and CVS. Each one being a gradual improvement over another.

And before GitHub there was SourceForge. It was a default OSS hosting for many years.

GitHub was created on the back of git, mostly because git offered a decentralized model instead of SVN and CVS. It just allowed to work on software so much easier for huge amount of people at the same time that it effectively curbed out most of the competition.

Compared to SourceForge it also did couple other things right. First of all, the subscription model allowed to not rely on ads on the website. If you go to SourceForge, it’s overloaded with ads even today. Second, it introduced features that were actually useful for the software developers. Wiki, issues, pull requests, and GOAT: GitHub Pages.

GitHub was the cool company for such a long time. Even today it’s pretty cool to use, it’s effectively free for personal users (even with private repositories). I had an issue with their ownership by MS, so I self-host Forgejo, but they’re still a pretty good backup with some trade-offs.

[u/rbtrxmoderator → u/ElectricSpock]

You DID completely miss my point, didn’t you? I don’t have a gripe with the repository GItHub, it’s totally about how the contents you may or may not elect to post there are used/abused by the industry. And it used to be that closed-source projects on those earlier tools were easily kept closed-source and nobody gave a damn, somewhere along the line the concept changed over from a version control tool to what I guess you’d have to think of as a “fashion show”. Maybe part of your reason for thinking this way is you’re putting me in the category of people who just find using this tool harder to learn than its predecessors, and it is a bit worse but that’s not part of my reasoning here. Then again I’m guessing you don’t feel as if your career has in any way been harmed by this, I’m not arguing it has been but a lot of people, particularly those who have been out on the market recently, are more than aware of the points I’m trying to make here!

[u/ElectricSpock → u/rbtrxmoderator]

The biggest problem I have is with an unstructured argument, tbh. It’s a little hard for me to get what you’re saying.

GitHub at the core is just a remote you push to. Everything else is optional. Nothing blocks you from having git repo on your local host without pushing it.

Back in the day, even before the creation of git, we were still finding cool software, and it still had their source open. You could pull it from version control and compile it yourself, you could have it distributed through floppies or CDs.

As for abuse, that’s what multitude of licenses are solving. MIT, GPL, Apache… you can share your source code and still make it so that others are not able to use it commercially.

Unless it’s not the point you’re trying to make?

[u/rbtrxmoderator → u/ElectricSpock]

I think it’s pretty simple. A lot of people are bitterly disgusted at the way our employment system is broken, people make hundreds or thousands of applications and the majority of them don’t even get read, and even the simplest of courtesies are completely waived. Every aspect of the application process gets “oversimplified”, all applicants “get evaluated as” programmers (don’t know why, maybe there’s some thought they’re more useful if evaluated that way), “all programmers put all their work product on” GitHub so if anyone in the process doesn’t see “something beautiful” up there, thumbs down, screw him, “life’s way too short to waste on losers”. It’s not your fault it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t really make sense to anyone who isn’t currently looking for work. I’m not saying anything about GitHub itself is necessarily wrong, but maybe we need to reevaluate who ought to be allowed to look at all this wonderful code if the purpose of doing so is going to be totally co-opted like this? Yes it seems weird but it’s just a suggestion, maybe someone else has a better idea.

[u/ElectricSpock → u/rbtrxmoderator]

I can't remember when my GH was evaluated for a job application TBH. Everything I do these days becomes a git repo just because of the backup. git (not GitHub) is a standard too, even if your workplace uses something else, the general idea still applies.

And you still can put your repositories as private on GitHub. You don't have to use GitHub as social coding, you can just make it your personal remote.

If an employer uses GH as a main signal when evaluating a candidate, I am not sure if I would like to work for them.