Your GitHub green squares are lying to you
Open your GitHub profile right now and look at the contribution graph. A year of little green squares, some weeks darker than others, that one heroic streak in March. It feels like proof. Look how much I code. Look how consistent I am. And then you send that profile to someone hiring, and nothing happens. Because the graph is answering a question nobody asked.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Green squares measure that you committed. They do not measure that anyone trusted you, paid you, scoped you, or signed off on what you shipped. They are a record of activity, on your own repo, on your own terms, graded by you. That is not nothing. It is just not the thing you think it is.
Activity is not evidence
You can farm that graph in an afternoon. Commit a typo fix. Push a README. Rename a variable, commit, rename it back, commit again. The graph goes green and it has no idea whether you solved a real problem or just touched a file. It cannot tell the difference between shipped a feature a stranger depends on and renamed config.js to config.ts at 2am. To the graph, both are a square.
And the people doing this honestly aren't even cheating. Most green graphs are full of side projects nobody runs, tutorials half-finished, and that SaaS idea you abandoned in week two. Real effort, sure. But effort spent on things with no stakes, no reviewer, and no one on the other side who'd be annoyed if it disappeared.
A green square proves you showed up. It says nothing about whether anyone was counting on you to.
What the person hiring is actually scanning for
Here's what nobody tells you: a hiring manager doesn't read your graph. They glance at it for about two seconds to check you're not a ghost, and then they go looking for the only thing that matters — evidence that you can take a vague problem from someone else and finish it well enough that they're glad they handed it to you.
That is the entire job. Not writing code. Anyone can write code now; a model will draft it for free. The job is the part around the code:
Did you understand a request that was scoped by someone other than you?
Did you ship something that survived a real reviewer, not just your own "looks good to me"?
Did someone with skin in the game say "yes, this solved my problem"?
Can a stranger verify any of it without taking your word for it?
Your contribution graph can't answer a single one of those. Not because you didn't work hard. Because it was never built to.
The proof you can’t fake
This is the gap that everything points back to. The green squares, a portfolio of to-do apps, a resume that says “proficient in React” are all promises. They're you, vouching for you. And everyone knows it, which is exactly why they don't move the needle anymore.
The signal that actually counts is the one you can't generate alone. Someone posts a real task. You claim it, scope it, build it, and submit it. They review it like it's going into production, because it is. They approve it, and money moves. Now there's a record that isn't your word, it's their word, backed by a payment, that you finished real work they depended on. You can't farm that with a rename loop.
A portfolio shows what you chose to display. A paid, approved ship shows what someone else was willing to bet on.
Where Forke fits
This is the whole reason Forke exists. Not to replace your GitHub, keep it, it's still where the code lives. But to give you the one thing the green graph never could: proof, owned by someone other than you, that you can be trusted with real work and you delivered. You claim a task, ship it, someone approves it with money on the line, and that becomes a verified mark on your profile that a stranger can check.
Do it once and you've crossed the wall between “I promise I can code” and “here's a person who paid me to.” Do it forty times and your profile says something a year of green squares never will: this person finishes things people rely on.
Stop farming squares. Go ship something someone actually approves.
