[HN Gopher] Gamification affects software developers: Cautionary...
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Gamification affects software developers: Cautionary evidence from
GitHub
Author : edward
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-10-23 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| I can't understand how anyone thinks github's commit graph is in
| any way meaningful. All it does it increase churn.
| niels_bom wrote:
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law?wprov=sfti1
| bunabhucan wrote:
| Has anyone written (or detected) software/scripts to game the
| gamification? 24/48h delay/scheduled git push so you can have a
| healthy work life balance while feigning to employers that you
| are a code machine.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| There is even a tool[1] to draw images in commit history (so
| called gitifi).
|
| It is possible because git allows to create and push commit
| with arbitrary date, using GIT_AUTHOR_DATE env variable or
| --date flag.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
| TomK32 wrote:
| 'Goodhart's Law' - That every measure which becomes a target
| becomes a bad measure. -- Keith Hoskins
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| mistrial9 wrote:
| (gamification) an expression of paternalism from the C_suite, who
| believe coders are basically ungrown children, and encouraging
| that for their own benefit IMHO
| teptoria wrote:
| I think you'd find that young or old, dumb or smart, we all
| respond fairly attentively to gamification whether we like it
| or not
| einpoklum wrote:
| "GitHub removed two counters from developer profiles that tracked
| their current and all-time longest streaks of uninterrupted daily
| contributions"
|
| Those the least significant aspect of gamification on GitHub.
| Stars, visits, downloads and maybe forks are what developers are
| interested in. And - strangely - the article seems to ignore
| them.
|
| "GitHub has gamification elements in the form of badges for
| projects."
|
| What, that stupid shark and cat icons? They're just embarrassing
| and I don't even remember what they mean. I found out I can turn
| them off and they were gone for good.
| youainti wrote:
| But those were the interventions removed so they could measure
| the impact.
| gandalfgeek wrote:
| Self plug but in case you don't want to read the full paper
| here's a short 5 min video summary:
|
| https://youtu.be/pwYRVnmnnQc
| maximilianroos wrote:
| This paper is cheerless -- gamification for good should be
| celebrated!
|
| If we can make contributing to open source projects as exciting
| as playing Factorio or watching TikTok, that's a huge benefit to
| society.
|
| And even if we don't care about the benefits to society, it's
| also much better for the developers -- they can be part of a
| community, know they're making an impact on the world,
| potentially get a better job through their passion.
|
| Is there a potential downside, that people build fewer human
| connections, spend less time with their family, delay finding a
| partner -- sure. But is it more of a risk than with video games
| or their job? I can't see how we can draw that conclusion.
|
| So let's give contributors more status, and if that means more
| badges on GitHub, great.
| porcoda wrote:
| > If we can make contributing to open source projects as
| exciting as playing Factorio or watching TikTok, that's a huge
| benefit to society.
|
| If you suck at Factorio or waste time on TikTok, it doesn't
| really affect anyone else other than yourself and your direct
| friends/family. If you're contributing to OSS to earn points
| based solely on participation and not quality/value, you're
| having a negative effect on the signal-to-noise ratio and
| quality of the OSS community. That is NOT a huge benefit to
| society. Simple participation isn't inherently beneficial if
| that participation is just a source of noise.
|
| I speak as someone who has had to sift through and reject pull
| requests and issues from incompetent developers. I'd rather
| they not be encouraged to waste my time.
| maximilianroos wrote:
| If any "incompetent developers" are reading this, come and
| contribute at Xarray or PRQL -- you will be part of an
| exciting project, and we'll mentor you to become competent
| developers. Your contributions will be appreciated by the
| devs and the users alike.
| luqtas wrote:
| coding, specially for open-source projects does not even gets
| close on how much cognition you have to burn vs. watching
| TikTok...
|
| i would have someone coding with me excited by seeking
| knowledge rather than trying to reach level 75 on Github...
|
| not even mentioning what is gamification? are levels based on
| dark patterns on video-games, created with the intention of
| making players waste more time or get more addicted?
|
| and then what is the end point of having someone full of badges
| and trophies on their profile? to compare oneself with others
| and feel bad? have benefits over others that a hierarchical
| system has?
|
| append: i am not typing levels were created specifically for a
| dark-pattern introduction but nowadays, even if the game is not
| free, these practices are done to make players addicted. and i
| can not feel how someone really interested into get better at
| coding, would care
| dleslie wrote:
| I'm going to buck the comment trend thus far and state that I
| enjoy the gamified experience.
|
| Getting an achievement in recognition of the open source work
| that I've done feels great, and honestly it's more positive
| recognition then I would normally receive for that same effort.
|
| I also appreciate the activity chart and graph, since they double
| as a way to monitor my productivity and therefore my energy. If
| I've felt that I had a bad week and the charts contradict this,
| then it's easier to stop myself from feeling down on myself.
|
| I am just a social mammal, after all; and a life long gamer. This
| works for me, but maybe not everyone.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I also enjoyed it, but I was only coding on my own stuff back
| then for fun to pass time without having or thinking about a
| job. I can't imagine doing this on non-solo projects with other
| people's opinions involved.
|
| At the same time I'm glad it's gone as it seemed to cause more
| harm than good for other developers.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My company constantly tries gamified stuff. It doesn't matter if
| you turn it into a game if I know the game is rigged.
| teej wrote:
| > They urge caution: gamification can steer the behavior of
| software developers in unexpected and unwanted directions.
|
| Adding streak counters steers behavior towards maintaining
| streaks. That's unexpected?
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| I've always maintained: if you put a number next to someone's
| name, then that person will try everything to try and increase
| that number. GitHub is no different than any other social media
| platform, and has various metrics (Stars, Followers,
| Contributions, etc) that people relentlessly try to game.
| meken wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't see any mention of status in the abstract, which
| seems like an important driver.
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| Yup I always cringe a little bit when I see developers on their
| repos or social media asking for follows or stars to their
| repo. If it's good people will do that anyways.
|
| It seems like it can be a resume builder for some people
| though. I've seen resumes where people list their open-source
| repos and display "Over 500 stars on github" as one of the
| line-items.
| juunpp wrote:
| Do you mean like how HN puts a number next to your name?
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| Yeah but Hackernews' karma score doesn't really mean anything
| to me. I mean it's great if one of my posts gets to the
| frontpage and all, but for me it's a useless metric. The only
| purpose it serves is optics into how well a post performs,
| but that's about it.
| int_19h wrote:
| What if I told you that there's a top 10 and a top 100
| based on karma?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| Does it? How much karma do I need before I can see it?
| spockz wrote:
| You can see _your_ karma next to your name in the top bar
| when logged in. Or on your profile.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Actually that's something that annoys me.
|
| I used to not be able to: I set my bar to #000000, which
| is the same color as the text. And unless I'm imagining
| things, somewhere along the way it changed to #222222
|
| I can set the topbar to #222222, but then everything else
| shows up in an annoying low-contrast shadow
| fleischhauf wrote:
| yes
| theteapot wrote:
| I liked HN much more before I knew karma existed. Seriously
| first 6m on here didn't know about it. Now I know everything
| seems tainted.
| jahsome wrote:
| hjanssen wrote:
| It's very much interesting how gamification tickles the monkey
| parts of the brains of me and even the smartest people I know. We
| even know it's "stupid" or "useless" and still strive to make the
| number go up.
|
| Frankly, thats terrifying, now that I think about it. What a
| powerful tool.
| contingencies wrote:
| _First rule of HN club. Don 't talk about the gamification._
| (Ssh... I pressed the triangle for you anyway.)
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I really don't like how GitHub has turned into a social network
| of sorts. The gamified elements are encouraging people to work
| for free and MS probably knows this. GitHub should just be a
| place to host and build code, not to flex your follower or star
| count. Some examples of gamified elements I find quite toxic:
| * Achievements on profiles * Highlights on profiles *
| "Activity overview" which shows an extremely flawed gauge of the
| work you're doing (Code review, Issues, etc)
| MisterTea wrote:
| Use https://sourcehut.org/ then. It is against such
| gamification elements and Drew has been quite vocal abut this
| issue.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| IMO this is the main thing GitHub has over GitLab. Most
| platforms which support GitHub also support GitLab, GitLab has
| equivalents for many of GitHub's features like actions, and
| GitLab even has comparable free tier storage (as they've
| decided not to delete inactive free projects [1])
|
| If someone just wants to host and build code there are many
| alternatives (like Sourcehut). The only reason GitHub is so
| dominant is because of its already huge following and
| exploration / networking which relies on said following.
|
| [1] https://news.itsfoss.com/gitlab-inactive-projects-policy/
| walrus01 wrote:
| If you don't like how GitHub has become a social network of
| sorts, you _really_ won 't like how LinkedIn is apparently the
| new Facebook.
|
| I have even seen a number of creepy screenshots from horny
| single men on LinkedIn sending unsolicited messages to women
| they think are attractive, trying to use it as a dating
| website.
|
| GitHub and linkedin are both owned by MS and trying really hard
| to be social networks, so the follow on social consequences of
| mass adoption seem almost inevitable.
| theteapot wrote:
| Wow that's a tangent.
| abledon wrote:
| my first "wtf" was seeing the "pull shark" badge... really? I
| do like that they give you the option to disable showing your
| achievements in the settings.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The badges are just not that compelling. Feels like an
| "everyone gets an award" thing. You shouldn't get an award
| for making a PR.. Show an award when your repo reaches 10,000
| stars or something.
| scrollaway wrote:
| ... turned into?
|
| GitHub's motto VERY EARLY ON was "social coding". They kept
| that motto for a long time.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Yes. And it did that perfectly well five years ago before
| they bolted on all this bloat nonsense.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yep, many people forget GitHub was trying to be Facebook but
| for coders from the very start. Back in late 2000s when FB
| was the hottest startup everyone was trying to do "the
| Facebook of X" knockoffs.
| jiayo wrote:
| Yes, one of the earliest archive.org snapshots from 14 years
| ago shows this:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080906001759/http://github.com.
| ..
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Love that self-presentation from 2008:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080905195808/http://logicalaw
| e...
| Palomides wrote:
| you can turn them all off, at least for your own profile
| juunpp wrote:
| "Focusing on a set of software developers that were publicly
| pursuing a goal to make contributions for 100 days in a row"
|
| Clearly not contributions of very high quality. Must have been
| Hacktoberfest-quality commits.
| MrLeap wrote:
| Gamification affects all humans. This is why I'm making a text
| editor game, so people write more.
| throwaway0asd wrote:
| As someone completely oblivious to gamification on GitHub what is
| the primary motivation? Is this some form of social validation,
| like resume padding, or do people contribute to this behavior for
| some other quality. What goal does this fulfill?
| jesuscript wrote:
| Gamification works until it doesn't. Ask the most addicted gamers
| that exhausted games they've played endlessly. It burns something
| out in your brain and you can never truly return to said game.
|
| Whatever. The burn out from gamification is of no consequence
| simply because the economy knows there are fresh bodies to take
| the place of the torched.
| wwilim wrote:
| If someone told me they're striving to achieve 100 days in a row
| of contributing, my first thoughts would be "egocentrism" and
| "dishonesty". Helping isn't about you helping. And if you're
| aiming for 100 days in a row, I'm pretty sure you're pushing
| changes you could've pushed during the week on Saturday and
| Sunday to keep up the streak. Somebody could've reviewed it two
| days earlier, but you kept them waiting until Monday, just for
| style points.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I hear you, and don't disagree re: potentially questionable
| weekend commits, but also know from experience (and having read
| many books on productivity and motivation) that tracking
| behavior and using "don't break the streak" as a motivator can
| be effective.
| tomrod wrote:
| The article discusses gamification, but really a lot of the
| general incentives for open source are to bolster the resume of
| the developer by showing they work on important, credible
| things.
|
| Gamification transforms that generally open-ended benefit into
| KPIs of various sorts -- rather than present overall value as a
| contributor, you get badges for _how_ you develop.
|
| Dark times.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I'm not really sure that that's true for most FOSS
| contributions. I think (anecdotally) most maintainers of even
| smaller FOSS projects are driven by solving a particular
| problem they're facing, not because it generates status. I
| think most developers who are contributing to FOSS projects
| because it makes them seem credible are not usually
| contributing much to those projects (as they're rarely core
| maintainers).
| btown wrote:
| The key here is whether it's "contributing" or "contributing to
| ___." If someone's goal is, say, to ensure that every day they
| make at least a few lines of incremental progress on their
| [game/book/project/set of open source projects they want to
| contribute to] etc., and even/especially if they publicize that
| goal to create some external accountability, that can be a
| really powerful tool - as long as it doesn't get ahead of one's
| well-being, etc. But having a streak just for having a streak's
| sake is unhealthy at best.
| saagarjha wrote:
| If someone told me they're striving to achieve 100 days in a
| row of running, my first thoughts would be "egocentrism" and
| "dishonesty".
| moffkalast wrote:
| If someone told me they're striving to achieve 100 days in a
| row of lying for profit, my first thoughts would be
| "egocentrism" and "dishonesty". But it's actually just called
| marketing apparently and it's a job.
| blargey wrote:
| If your code commits are, like running: regular chunks of
| interchangeable, repetitive, rote, menial labor that an
| untrained child can do, where the only benefit expected by
| anybody is your own personal exertion, and making it a
| static, mechanical routine with no novel output is the very
| goal for the majority of practitioners?
|
| Then of course nobody would criticize you for aiming for a
| "streak".
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I might be missing something, since I don't use github that
| much: Are you implying there's no way you can imagine that
| someone could cook up something useful enough to commit to
| a feature branch under development during a day's work?
|
| Maybe if they're working on rocket control firmware or
| something that's true, but it's not hard to imagine being
| able to make a small fix/upgrade/refactor to some sort of
| app every day
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| To me it leans more in the ego direction if they were using a
| social network platform to track the running activity so that
| it can be compared to their friend's activity.
|
| I feel this is really about wether you are doing something
| for genuine self improvement or to gain social status. It's
| the latter we tend not to like because when wanting to gain
| social status you tend to shortcut and "cheat" the self
| improvement part. However it's not always easy to distinguish
| the two.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think the point the OPs was making is you cannot store up
| miles on Monday that you can then release Wednesday. You can
| with commits / stashes.
|
| And that distorts behaviour
| saagarjha wrote:
| You can definitely avoid going on longer runs with the
| intention that you'll have an easier time tomorrow.
| jrumbut wrote:
| But you can also be motivated by a streak and do work you
| wouldn't have otherwise done.
|
| Personally I find streaks are powerful motivators. If this
| were going to affect my work negatively it would probably
| be something like "not resting adequately."
| aliqot wrote:
| I don't think people actually do that though. Who'd do
| that? Who would you even be lying to, yourself?
| jfabre wrote:
| Assuming your question wasn't sarcasm. Literally everyone
| lie to themselves about one thing or another... Including
| me, and probably including you.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| See _House M.D._ for details :-)
| aliqot wrote:
| I don't understand how it is possible to lie to myself.
| It requires you to suspend disbelief and say to yourself
| that something did or didn't happen, that's something I
| cannot fathom.
| a1445c8b wrote:
| > I don't understand how it is possible to lie to myself.
|
| It's called bias and its various types.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Lying to yourself doesn't necessarily require suspension
| of belief entirely, but convincing yourself whatever you
| are doing is worth you doing it. Since it's hard
| (probably impossible) to know the object truth of if
| something is " right" or not. Then it becomes fairly easy
| to justify anything, im sure you've done this even if you
| don't know exactly how to admit it or don't think you're
| doing it consciouly.
| peanut_merchant wrote:
| Potentially, the people responsible for deciding your
| salary.
|
| Even without gamefication I am guilty of storing up
| commits on "productive" days because I am conscious I may
| not have the same output the next day.
| aliqot wrote:
| > Potentially, the people responsible for deciding your
| salary.
|
| Yikes, yeah I forget some people have that type of
| workplace that isn't necessarily result driven. If that
| is the case and does get someone escorted at least
| there's a chance they'll end up somewhere more engaging.
| sheerun wrote:
| Yet everyone undestands why apps that help develop routines
| exist
| walrus01 wrote:
| Ranking output of a task by bulk quantity without any measurement
| is _not_ a good idea. Maybe some people didn 't get the memo that
| taking software development advice from Josef Stalin isn't the
| greatest concept.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/795954-quantity-has-a-quali...
|
| "Quantity has a quality all its own."
|
| -- Joseph Stalin
| aabaker99 wrote:
| I never understand people chasing daily commits to GitHub. You
| can push whatever git history you want to GitHub. I can rewrite
| all my commits so they are evenly distributed across however days
| I want to show up green on GitHub.
| toimtoimtoim wrote:
| As a maintainer for quite popular Go repo (20k+ stars) I find
| really annoyed by the amount of trivial PRs (started at start of
| 2022 or some time like that). Especially then some random dude
| starts to "improve" tests by checking errors etc and submit
| multiple different PRs where each PR "fixes" only one file.
|
| this crap makes my life harder as I do this stuff from my spare
| time. Doing comprehensive review takes me 30min to 1h sometime
| more couple of hours to provide alternatives with examples etc.
|
| I have not seen almost no rise of useful PRs that add features or
| fix bugs since that change in early 2022. Only rise of trivial
| nononse PRs.
| aliqot wrote:
| A good idea is to create a file called CONTRIBUTING, and then
| inside put 5 of your top bullet points for what you expect form
| a PR. I thought it was dumb at first, but people actually used
| them to my surprise. Hope it works out for you! Also it helps
| if you don't tag your repos for the hackathon things.
| maximilianroos wrote:
| As a maintainer for two less popular repos (3K & 5K stars), I'm
| very happy to get small PRs with incremental changes. Many of
| our large contributors have started this way.
|
| We have a robust test and linting suite on both, so we often
| don't need much human engagement for reviews -- code looks
| reasonable, tests pass, smash "Merge".
|
| Out of interest -- do you find they're not actually improving
| the code? Or it's just not worth the time to review it?
| cehrlich wrote:
| How many stars were you at when this began to happen? I
| maintain a repo with 8k stars and so far we've not gotten a
| single PR that felt like it was in bad faith - even with the
| hacktober fest tag.
| k__ wrote:
| Somehow, I never cared about GitHubs social media features. It's
| just a cheap way to host code.
|
| On the other hand, I generally don' tend to get addicted easily.
| martinwoodward wrote:
| Martin from GitHub here. I think we'd consider this very much 'by
| design' in removing the streak counter so I'm glad it had the
| desired affect. Coding 100 days straight with no breaks isn't
| good for anyone.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| The commit graph should at lest have a disclaimer of some kind.
| Plus I think the lines of code added/removed are a better
| indicator than number of commits. Perhaps with some heuristic
| to detect whether a lot of lines were being changed similarly,
| such as if code was changed by a wizard or from a find and
| replace.
|
| A colleague once showed me a tool to produce back dated commits
| in bogus git repos so you can draw pictures on your commit
| graph. You should know that people are gaming the gamification.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > Coding 100 days straight with no breaks isn't good for
| anyone.
|
| Why? I've done that and it has been amazing for me. I don't
| want other people telling me what's good or not. Absolute
| statements like this is just social malaise and not based in
| objectivity in the slightest.
|
| The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: "Work is
| bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy".
|
| HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics.
|
| Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped
| thinking for themselves.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| > Why?
|
| Well one might start to excessively think like a computer!
|
| For example, most humans can account for the imprecise nature
| of language and understand that "for anyone" doesn't
| necessarily mean _every individual human on earth_ , but
| rather a sizeable portion of people. And "isn't good" is
| speaking relative to the poster's ideas rather than them
| claiming to have determined an absolute measure of the term
| "good".
|
| -
|
| But a computer struggles with such fuzzy constraints and
| falls back to the most literal interpretation of any
| statement.
|
| At which point the GPT-3 model the computer is running might
| regurgitate some overreaction by jumping from someone
| essentially saying: "everything in moderation" to
| interpreting it as an attack on hard work and good work
| ethics.
| adamisom wrote:
| This is an unfair attack. Choosing "for anyone" _instead_
| of another phrase does indeed carry meaning. You 're both
| finding more meaning than is justified. A little wobble in
| imprecision from martin led to a bigger one in
| systemvoltage, led to a bigger one in you.
|
| (A better ending sentence from martin might've been "We
| don't want to incentivize 100-day streaks." But that has
| its own, orthogonal downsides--oh, GitHub's in the business
| of setting incentives? Uh oh... So all in all, I think I
| understand his choice of phrasing.)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I'm just generally fed up of antiwork culture here. We
| are teaching youngsters to never persevere and push
| themselves to the limit, ensuring they'll never realize
| their full potential and spiraling downwards in a low
| quality life of lethargy and resentment towards those who
| succeed.
|
| I thought this is "Hacker News". The tone here has slid
| significantly in last 5 years. Folks like Martin
| apologizing indirectly.
| Kiro wrote:
| I want to code every single day for the rest of my life. I have
| no interest in vacations, traveling or any of that nonsense.
| Queue29 wrote:
| Nobody is stopping you.
| k0k0r0 wrote:
| My sarcasm detector is not sure about this one.
| aliqot wrote:
| Martin thanks for jumping in, the thing I'd love most is when
| I'm logged in and go to github.com, just take me to my
| repository list. I'd pay money for that.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Force your browser to open
| https://github.com/USERNAME?tab=repositories instead of the
| homepage by default by altering autocomplete priority (in
| Chrome[1], in Firefox[2]).
|
| [1]: https://superuser.com/a/1402013/1109910
|
| [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-
| autocomplet...
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(page generated 2022-10-23 23:00 UTC)