
Do they have work/life balance? Investigating potential employers with GitHub - tomerbd
https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/31/does-company-have-worklife-balance/
======
mooreds
If you wanted to really speed things up, you could do this in an automated
fashion or with google sheets (to suck in the graphic below).

For manual review:
[https://github.com/users/mooreds/contributions?to=2018-12-31](https://github.com/users/mooreds/contributions?to=2018-12-31)

For more automation: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/@simonwep/github-
contributions](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@simonwep/github-contributions)
or [https://github.com/sallar/github-contributions-
api](https://github.com/sallar/github-contributions-api) look useful.

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rad_gruchalski
Two things to consider:

1) it's possible to hide private contributions from public profile

2) weekend coding is a vague info; one shall check what commits have been
added, maybe the person is doing side projects, contributing to OSS, not
related to work? Maybe the person actually enjoys coding and the amount of
time spent during the weekend is "their healthy balance"?

~~~
itamarst
Both of these are covered in the article.

1) That's why you should check multiple people's profiles.

2) That's why you should differentiate private from public repos, and again
why you should check multiple people's profiles.

Any individual person doesn't tell you much. If you find 10 people all coding
on the weekend on private repos on the same dates, it's probably not for fun,
it's probably crunch time.

~~~
rad_gruchalski
> Any individual person doesn't tell you much. If you find 10 people all
> coding on the weekend on private repos on the same dates, it's probably not
> for fun, it's probably crunch time.

Great info. Thank you.

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souprock
If the employer has stuff on GitHub, then:

1\. obviously they don't take security seriously

2\. you could be asked to work on their stuff when you are at home

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levythe
Point one is not obvious to me. Could you elaborate?

~~~
souprock
If you take security seriously, you make sure that only your own employees can
access the data. This requires that you use your own hardware in your own
facility.

For anything really important, you keep it on a LAN separate from the
internet. You don't trust firewalls.

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megaman8
It's an interesting idea, and could probably be turned into some kind of
product. I'm envisioning a product that pulls factors from multiple sources:
GitHub posts, articles from media, etc and rates companies by work/life
balance, along with some kind of measure for standard deviation.

~~~
AznHisoka
Isn't that already GlassDoor? Even better, they pull straight from the source:
employees.

~~~
muttled
It would capture some data from the majority who never end up leaving a rating
one way or another.

------
writepub
When people code, most of the time, is unrelated to work-life balance. Many
people code weekends if they slacked off during the week.

How many hours they code is probably a better indicator. Commit times and
frequency aren't really indicative of hours invested in coding.

This post needs a disclaimer as "speculation"

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Commit times and frequency aren't really indicative of hours invested in
> coding.

I don't agree. Environments exist where people code 12+ hours a day, six days
a week. Commit times and frequency _are likely influenced by time invested in
coding_. Could you spend 12 hours on a problem with only one commit?
Definitely! But if your commit window is spread across 12+ hours a day and the
frequency of commits within that window is non-insignificant, it's unlikely
that is artificially expanded from less work. It is a signal worth extracting.

You'd want to cast a net over as much of the engineering talent in an org that
you can to find useful trends.

I would pay for this as part of some sort of Glassdoor/Stackoverflow Jobs
hybrid. Only show me jobs where work/life balance doesn't suck.

~~~
tomerbd
But most companies use in house/private cloud hosted repository...

