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The black market in GitHub stars

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Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#71

Post by [deleted] »

tedivm wrote: post #22
siva7 wrote: post #10

Is this really a thing or just some local phenomena? I can't remember that the github profile played a role in any hiring committee i've been part of (western europe) as people understood that most of the experienced software developers aren't active open source contributors.

In my experience it's a positive sign to have an active Github profile or open source contributions, but it is not a negative sign if a candidate doesn't have one. At higher levels (Principal, Distinguished) you often have to show external contributions to the industry, and some companies count open source towards this. I can honestly say that my profile has been a huge benefit to my career, but that's more due to 20…

[deleted]

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#72

Post by dotnet00 »

flutas wrote: post #13
nocommandline wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant number of folks (especially non-professional developers) make a choice on which library/project to use based on the number of GitHub stars. For these people, the more number of stars, the more it means the 'package is good/useful'. You can argue it isn't the best/most effective way but it's quite common.

I find myself (as a professional software dev) trying to break that mindset frequently, especially on GitHub, when looking at libraries to use for a task if there's more than 1. What I try to focus on now is more so the commit and release cadence / frequency since in my mind frequent activity means it's more likely to have bugs fixed and security issues handled. Would love to hear other's input on this.

Agreed, I haven't ever really looked at stars, mainly I look at number of/most recent commit and the state of the issues tab, with more importance assigned to the latter.

If there are any important unresolved issues, it's a fail. If the issues have been resolved, it's a potential pass.

If there aren't any issues, I'll think about the complexity of the project relative to the number of commits/time since most recent commit, since if there aren't many commits and haven't been any for a while, it's more likely that the library isn't used by other people enough and may be buggy. But if it's still an active project, it might be worth trying anyway since I might be able to work with the maintainers to resolve potential issues (especially if there aren't any better options).

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#73

Post by silenced_trope »

simonw wrote: post #58

Most of the comments here seem to assume buying stars is about making personal profiles more attractive to hiring. I doubt that's the motivation here. I think this is about projects themselves wanting a high star count in order to attract users, customers and investors.

Upvoted. Nobody even clicked through to read the first paragraphs :D

My initial read of just the headline was similar. It reminded me of those devs whose YouTube videos or repo READMEs ask (beg?) for you to star their repo.

But this is clearly about investors who invest in open source projects and use Github stars as a proxy for community engagement and velocity (whether right or wrong).

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#74

Post by bdw5204 »

zuzu89 wrote: post #30
siva7 wrote: post #10

Is this really a thing or just some local phenomena? I can't remember that the github profile played a role in any hiring committee i've been part of (western europe) as people understood that most of the experienced software developers aren't active open source contributors.

> (western europe) as people understood that most of the experienced software developers aren't active open source contributors. that's probably true for western europe. compared to the US there is significant less open source projects,businesses and developers.

Most experienced software developers in the US also aren't active open source contributors. Most experienced developers who have contributed to open source probably did so as part of their job whether because they worked for an open source business or because they fixed an issue with an open source project that was important to their employer's business.

I personally have contributions to an open source project because I was employed by it for around 3 years but I generally spend my free time on hobbies other than writing code.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#75

Post by tzhenghao »

simonw wrote: post #58

Most of the comments here seem to assume buying stars is about making personal profiles more attractive to hiring. I doubt that's the motivation here. I think this is about projects themselves wanting a high star count in order to attract users, customers and investors.

This. I've seen a couple open core startups that are less than a year old with thousands of stars on their repositories, so I decided to have a look at some of these profiles who starred the project. Most of them have weird usernames that resemble spam accounts, almost all of them cannot be pointed to some other profile on a different platform (Twitter, LinkedIn, HN etc.).

Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to watchers / forks. I remember one project with thousands of stars but only 10 users "watching" it. They went on to raise a sizable seed round too.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#76

Post by smacke »

tzhenghao wrote: post #75
simonw wrote: post #58

Most of the comments here seem to assume buying stars is about making personal profiles more attractive to hiring. I doubt that's the motivation here. I think this is about projects themselves wanting a high star count in order to attract users, customers and investors.

This. I've seen a couple open core startups that are less than a year old with thousands of stars on their repositories, so I decided to have a look at some of these profiles who starred the project. Most of them have weird usernames that resemble spam accounts, almost all of them cannot be pointed to some other profile on a different platform (Twitter, LinkedIn, HN etc.). Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to wa…

> Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to watchers / forks. I remember one project with thousands of stars but only 10 users "watching" it. They went on to raise a sizable seed round too.

Not necessarily indicative of foul play. I have two projects like this (https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync and https://github.com/ipyflow/ipyflow) and I attribute it to not having great developer documentation.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#77

Post by bdw5204 »

nocommandline wrote: post #8
kelsey9876543 wrote: post #6

it won't help, when given a github profile most people will go read your actual commits we do not give a darn about stars

A significant number of folks (especially non-professional developers) make a choice on which library/project to use based on the number of GitHub stars. For these people, the more number of stars, the more it means the 'package is good/useful'. You can argue it isn't the best/most effective way but it's quite common.

That's the argumentum ad populum ("popular = good") fallacy[0] which is probably most of the most common logical fallacies. You can tell quite a bit about a person, not just as a developer but in general, by whether they always go with whatever's popular, they always go with something obscure or they go with a mixture of popular and obscure.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#79

Post by tzhenghao »

smacke wrote: post #76
tzhenghao wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've seen a couple open core startups that are less than a year old with thousands of stars on their repositories, so I decided to have a look at some of these profiles who starred the project. Most of them have weird usernames that resemble spam accounts, almost all of them cannot be pointed to some other profile on a different platform (Twitter, LinkedIn, HN etc.). Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to wa…

> Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to watchers / forks. I remember one project with thousands of stars but only 10 users "watching" it. They went on to raise a sizable seed round too. Not necessarily indicative of foul play. I have two projects like this ( https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync and https://github.com/ipyflow/ipyflow ) and I attribute it to not having great developer documentation.

Good point. By the way, I checked out both projects above and starred them. Pretty cool!

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#80

Post by smacke »

tzhenghao wrote: post #79
smacke wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another giveaway is the ratio of stars to watchers / forks. I remember one project with thousands of stars but only 10 users "watching" it. They went on to raise a sizable seed round too. Not necessarily indicative of foul play. I have two projects like this ( https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync and https://github.com/ipyflow/ipyflow ) and I attribute it to not having great developer documentation.

Good point. By the way, I checked out both projects above and starred them. Pretty cool!

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