If your GitHub contribution graph disappeared tomorrow, would that make you a worse developer?
For years, we’ve been trained — consciously or not — to treat green squares as a proxy for competence, discipline, or even passion.
TL;DR:
A GitHub contribution graph measures neither productivity, nor skill, nor engagement as a developer.
Let me start with two very short stories that inspired me to write this article.
Story #1: Auto-commits and visible consistency 🤖
This discussion was inspired by an article I recently read on DEV.
The author described how he created an app that automatically commits his code. According to him, he programs a lot, but often simply forgets to commit and push his changes — which makes his GitHub contribution graph look… poor.
And while I absolutely respect the curiosity, creativity, and the act of turning an idea into a working project, one thought immediately crossed my mind:
Who on earth evaluates developers based on the number of their commits?
That makes very little sense.
Many people in the comments agreed, but some shared stories from job interviews where managers actually asked candidates why their GitHub activity was so low. Even if the answer made perfect sense (for example: most of their work lives in private company repositories) and the interview continued normally, there was still that unpleasant feeling — the candidate was pushed into a defensive position for no good reason.
Personally, I’ve participated in many recruitment processes and was asked about my GitHub exactly once. But maybe I’m just lucky?
Story #2: The graph of doom 😱
A few days earlier, a friend from my previous job shared a screenshot of someone’s contribution graph. I’ve modified it here to protect privacy, but it looked roughly like this (The AI stubbornly paints 8 days a week instead of 7 — let's keep it that way 🙃):
Impressive? Maybe. Terrifying? Also maybe.
My friend — a very empathetic person — didn’t feel admiration at all. Instead, he felt concern.
Where is the work-life balance?
When does this person rest?
How does this human being even function?
The mystery was solved pretty quickly. The graph most likely looked like this because the user had a job that ran a daily database backup.
For the record: this person actually was very active on GitHub and contributed to many open-source projects — just… not that much.
And this is where we get to the core of the problem.
When did a contribution graph become a way to judge someone as a developer? 🤔
By design, it never should have been.
And it doesn’t hold up to even basic common sense.
And yet, somehow, we still look at it and think:
- “Oh, this person works a lot.”
- “This dev commits once in a while — probably not very engaged.”
It’s one thing when random people think like this.
It’s much worse when it happens during recruitment.
Because based on a contribution graph, you can’t tell:
- how good someone is,
- how busy they really are,
- or even whether the activity is meaningful at all.
One person may forget to commit or work mostly in private repositories. Another may solve complex problems for weeks with very few commits. Meanwhile someone else may just be running an automated job every day.🤷♂️
My own empty graph 🙃
I’m actually a great example of this.
Here is my impressive GitHub contribution graph for 2023:
So what happened in 2023? Maybe some of you will ask: “Sylwia, did you sleep through the whole year? Or maybe you won the lottery?” 🤔
The truth is I was a tech lead in a startup building Anti-Money Laundering technology. I worked hard, built a lot of things, and honestly — thanks to contributions to my company’s private repositories, my GitHub looked pretty impressive.
Then, in 2025, I changed job and was simply removed from those repositories. And just like that… my graph vanished.
Today, I create small demo repositories once a month — and given my current lifestyle, I consider that a lot.
What actually matters on GitHub 🧠
Of course, there is value in looking at someone’s GitHub more closely and seeing what they build.
Do they contribute to open source?
Do they create their own interesting projects?
Sometimes a person with a few solid projects and even a few months of inactivity is far more valuable than someone who commits a few lines of code every single day.
And besides…
Not everyone has to contribute to open source 🚶♀️🚶♂️
People contribute to the community in very different ways.
For example, I like writing blog posts. It doesn’t stress me out, I enjoy sharing my thoughts, and writing comes easily to me. I write fast, I read fast, and I don’t use my brain while doing any of it. 😅 After a full day of coding at work — plus endless calls like “Sylwia, how does this work?” — writing code in the evening is simply exhausting.
But I can easily imagine people for whom writing is painful, while coding after hours is pure relaxation.
Others create tutorials.
Some record videos.
Some prepare conference talks.
Some share work on StackBlitz or CodePen.
And some are so deeply engaged in their full-time jobs that they simply have no time or energy left for anything else related to code.
Which leads me to another question.
Does everyone really need to be active in the community? 🧩
IT is kind of a cultural anomaly here.
Is there any other industry where people are almost expected to work for free after hours for the benefit of others?
Do journalists write free articles at night just in case?
Do lawyers prepare guidelines for the community so they can get their next job?
Do shopkeepers learn about the products they sell after work to better help customers? 🤔🤣
I personally love the IT community and I’m happy to contribute. But not everyone has to.
People have families, hobbies, and different priorities. Some just come to work, do their job well, and then live their lives. And you know what? They might still be absolutely brilliant developers — sometimes better than the loudest community heroes.
Not every programmer has to be obsessed with IT or follow every new trend. We also need people who simply show up and deliver. And yes — we need them very much.
Over to you 💬
How about you?
Have you ever been asked about your GitHub contribution graph during recruitment?
Or has no one ever mentioned it?
I’m genuinely curious what your experience has been.
Top comments (117)
This resonates deeply. I've been coding professionally for more than 10 years, and my public GitHub graph tells exactly 0% of the story. The most complex, challenging work I've done - distributed systems, performance optimizations, architectural decisions - all lives in private repos.
The irony? Junior devs often have the greenest graphs because they're building portfolio projects. Senior devs are shipping production code that no one will ever see on GitHub. We've somehow gamified the wrong metric.
This is absolutely true - thank you for this comment. You’re right, and honestly I didn’t even think to call this out explicitly in the post.
I feel exactly the same. Some of the most challenging and meaningful work I’ve done lived entirely in private company repos, especially in startups. And startups are a special case on their own - when you’re already working that much, there’s often just no energy left to write code after hours.
The green squares really miss all of that. Thanks for adding this perspective.
totally agree, as you mentioned some devs, even if they code 8hrs/day for whole year, cannot simply show their work on github, bc it is not allowed.
And she/he might not have time or sanity to go further and do some coding for github activity chart.
If this is the only criteria or the major one to evaluate a dev, certainly some are clearly opt out.
I think it might be useful to write on my profile readme: my coding activities at work are not reflected here :)
Exactly - that’s how it is for many people. A lot of real work simply can’t be shown publicly, and after a full day of coding, there’s often no time or energy left to do more just for a chart.
I once interviewed with a company that handled this quite well: they looked at GitHub projects, and if they didn’t see relevant experience there, they simply gave a take-home assignment instead. Of course, with AI today that approach isn’t always perfect - but back then, it was a fair and reasonable solution.
Love this take! A lot of us don’t even push most of our code to GitHub anymore, especially if we work on GitLab (or private company repos). That means your “contribution graph” can look dead while you’re actually shipping real production work every day.
And honestly, most of what ends up on GitHub is side projects, experiments, or unpaid/exploratory work (sometimes open source too), which doesn’t represent the work that actually matters.
I used to obsess over GitHub stats early in my career, but once you start doing real work, you realize how much time goes into planning, reviews, debugging, testing, meetings… not just pushing commits daily.
Thanks for this comment - yes, exactly! I have the same impression: at work, the people who commit the most are usually juniors or mids, because they’re the ones primarily responsible for shipping code. Seniors often spend much more time coordinating, reviewing, planning, and unblocking others. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I’ve never really been obsessed with the contribution graph myself, but I’ll admit that when someone had a very green one, it did look impressive to me at first. After hearing a few stories like the ones I mentioned in the article, though, I’ve completely stopped caring about it 😄
Ohh definitely! I know many great senior devs who commit little to nothing at all and yet they still stay up to date, still flying through codes and problems effortlessly.
and speaking of commit graphs, I can assure you despite having heard of them - I have come nowhere close to trying out one of those auto commits tools 😭
mine are mostly from reviewing code lmao.
Hahaha, I could’ve used your graph as the cover photo then 😄
At work we use Bitbucket, so my GitHub is basically just demos and side experiments.
Maybe it’s time to set up a daily job there after all… purely for aesthetic reasons, of course 😅
If a recruiter stops their evaluation at your GitHub graph… poor thing, they’ve completely missed the point. Your contributions go far beyond what you push to GitHub — and that’s without even considering the intrinsic value of each commit.
Your articles are interesting and genuinely inspiring. Having read every one of them, it’s clear you bring so much to your audience by sharing your experience, asking the right questions, and even making people laugh — I’m thinking especially of your piece on commit quality via LLMs.
And just take a moment — literally two seconds — to consider this: if someone fixates on a vanity metric like that, it probably says more about their own life than about your work. Maybe they don’t have much else going on — no partner, no kids, not even a dog or cat… not even a goldfish to keep them company!
Thank you so much for the kind words, Pascal — I really appreciate them 😊
And yes, I agree: focusing on a vanity metric like that often says more about the person doing the judging than about the person being judged.
The only worrying part is when it actually does matter in hiring. I was personally asked about my GitHub activity only once, but who knows how common this is in other companies or countries.
What you wrote about “not having much else going on” really struck a chord with me. I remember a situation where a friend was almost angry at another developer for knowing everything about C++, practically having the documentation memorized. It later turned out that this was his entire world — he didn’t really have much of a life outside of it, and programming was his main source of meaning.
So yes, sometimes that’s the story behind what we call “success”. And it’s worth remembering that there’s usually a lot more going on beneath the surface than a graph full of green squares.
You're right — there are companies out there that still judge candidates by how many green boxes light up their GitHub graph. These are usually the places that hunt for mid-level engineers but pay them like interns, expect a level of devotion normally reserved for cult leaders, and offer absolutely nothing in return except… well, burnout with a complimentary hoodie.
If someone doesn’t know their worth, or feels like this is their last shot at staying employed, or desperately needs those green squares to feel alive… they might want to stock up on vitamins, antidepressants, and a therapist who charges by the hour. They’re going to need the full survival kit.
You, on the other hand, don’t need any of that — your work speaks for itself, loud enough that even the green-box worshippers can probably hear it.
Exactly — I couldn’t agree more. And honestly, I don’t think I’d want to work for a company like that anyway. The way a recruitment process looks usually says a lot about the company itself.
I care a lot about having a healthy work environment, especially considering that we spend around eight hours a day there. If green squares are treated as a serious signal, that’s already a pretty telling red flag for me.
I really loved what you wrote about this topic - nicely put into words what we were discussing about after our previous discussion in that comment section. You nailed it, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Thanks, Aryan! 😊
Oh yes - discussions like these are a constant source of inspiration. That’s exactly what I love about DEV.
This is such a grounded take, and honestly a necessary one.
The green-square obsession always felt like a leaky proxy pretending to be a signal. Anyone who’s worked on real systems knows that the hardest parts of the job rarely correlate with daily commits — they correlate with thinking, unblocking, designing, and carrying context that never makes it into a public repo. Distributed systems don’t get safer because someone committed every day; they get safer because someone slowed things down and made the right call.
I also appreciated how you called out private repos and lifecycle churn. Whole years of meaningful work can vanish from a graph overnight, even though the experience compounds. I’ve seen the same thing in system-level work: the most valuable contributions are often architectural constraints, invariants, and decisions that prevent bugs from existing at all — which, conveniently, produce fewer commits.
Metrics are tempting because they’re visible. But visibility isn’t value. A contribution graph is at best a trace, never the system. Judging engineers by it feels like evaluating a database by row count instead of correctness.
Really solid piece. It challenges the metric without dismissing contribution itself — that balance is hard to strike, and you nailed it.
Exactly - I completely agree. I often have the impression that the more senior or impactful the role, the less actual coding there is. Seniors frequently spend more time reviewing code than writing it, or doing things like configuration and system-level work.
In my case, I’ll often intentionally delegate tasks to juniors or mids (with proper supervision) if I know they can handle them. And a tech lead? They can easily spend a huge part of their time in calls, coordination, and decision-making - their contribution is the team’s output, not their own commits. A CTO can go weeks without touching code at all 😉
Thank you so much for the comment and the kind words - I really appreciate it.
Absolutely — that’s such an important point. Impact and responsibility tend to pull you away from writing code, not toward more commits. At some level, your output really is the team’s output, not your personal diff count.
Thanks for taking the time to respond — and for articulating this so clearly in the post. It’s refreshing to see senior work described honestly instead of reduced to vanity metrics.
The best coders I've known were already busy enough working on closed-source code to have an impressive contribution graph :/
Exactly! And very often people are so invested in their professional work that they simply don’t have the time or energy in the evenings — especially if they have families, other responsibilities, or even just hobbies unrelated to programming.
You made some good point as usual Sylwia! It is to bad that i can't work for you at that startup for Anti-Money Laundering Technology. It is sound really cool and fun :). You don't know if the person is really busy with work or personal matter throughout the year. Life happens :)
Thanks, Ben 🙂 And unfortunately I’m no longer working at that startup - but yes, it really was a very cool experience. And you’re absolutely right: you never know what someone is dealing with during the year, whether it’s work or personal life. Life definitely happens.
yeah, it happens!
I haven’t been asked directly in an interview. Over the years I’ve worked at companies where I had to use a separate GitHub company account or use gitlab and even bit bucket at some point, I was working and pushing updates, but not on my personal account, as a result my contribution graph was scanty.
I only recently started having lots of ‘greens’ because I began working on a project recently.
Thanks for sharing this - I can really relate. I’ve had the same experience: GitLab, Bitbucket, and sometimes even a separate company GitHub account at work. All the real work was happening there.
On my personal GitHub, I mostly have contributions outside of work as well. If someone judged me by that graph alone, those greens would probably need to count at least triple 😄
🙂
I know right? I love reading your articles too. Great job every time
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