How Gamification Affects Software Developers

In May 2016 GitHub removed two counters from developers' profiles that tracked their current and longest streaks of uninterrupted daily contributions; Moldon2021 is a study of what happened next. Its authors found that long-running streaks became less common, as did days in which people made a single contribution to keep their streak going. and that weekend contributions declined. They also found a decline in streaks across social networks, i.e., that if a developer stopped streaking, their contacts were more likely to stop streaking as well.

To which I can only respond, "Good." Gamification is a deliberate attempt to make systems more addictive, and addictive behaviors are never healthy. As the authors of Moldon2021 note:

…some emotional responses to GitHub's announcement that the streak counters were no longer part of developer profiles suggest that some developers had developed an unhealthy relationship with these elements. It also seems to us unlikely that developers logging in to make a single contribution to maintain an ongoing streak made useful or high quality contributions. This sort of behavior reflects an optimization of individual behavior for the sake of the game, and not for the quality of the work.

But burnout and low-quality work aren't the only risks. Trang2021 found that people were more likely to share privacy-violating information in gamified systems, and while some people are incentivized by the competitive nature of leaderboards, others (often those who are less self-confident or have been marginalized in the past) find them demoralizing. They are also a great example of how perverse incentives can distort work in damaging ways: if merged code is recognized but code reviews and helpful explanations to newcomers are not, your project is not going to be a healthy place to work Sholler2019.