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The black market in GitHub stars

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Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#82
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.

Or even legitimize a repository that is name squatting.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#83
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.

Ugh… can’t we have something that isn’t commercialized? Yikes.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I get a resume for someone I've been asked to interview, I'll certainly look at any github profiles, and if there's something relevant there, I'll often use their project as a basis for whatever coding exercise we do, such as extend this class to add X functionality. Or use it as a basis for design questions.

A nonstandard interview process like this is illegal in some jurisdictions. It may run afoul of US law too, depending on the outcomes. It is safer and easier to use a one size fits all interview.

Interview with coding and design is nonstandard and possibly illegal? We must be living in different timelines.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in old languages that don't encourage tons of dependencies like C, it's okay to call a library finished and stop developing it, so last commit 4 years ago is ok in a language like rust or typescript, depending on what the library does, and specially if it has a lot of dependencies, should probably be maintained continually. so in Rust last commit 4 years ago looks very bad

I agree with js but disagree on rust Rust libraries from 4 years ago are still working, js libraries are a hit or miss Then frontend is way worse than backend Overall if the code is old but well written, I'm happy to own a fork

Maybe 4 years isn't the right time frame but at some point there were sweeping changes in the language, like futures and async/await, that invalidated large parts of the ecosystem overnight (if you made a bet on a particular ecosystem you would either be stuck at maintaining an evolutionary dead end, or eventually migrate to tokio). It seems that Rust evolution is slowing down though.

Now if the library has tons of dependencies, regardless of language, it's very brittle to bring it unmaintained, because your own dependencies may be expected to interoperate with them. This is actually a plus because with C you may be required to do manual data conversions etc, but it also means that keeping old dependencies is a liability

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#87
I made a comment here yesterday how you can't use github accounts alone to measure someone's ability for similar reasons(I was arguing how IT/security certs have their place because they're proctored).

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can anecdotally attest to contact and employment happening solely based on Github profile - without it containing anything impressive - in Scandinavia, as well as a few cases where the profile was used as input in a regular interview process. Do what you want with that info.

Same, albeit they had no idea about its content. Same as for linkedin

In this case the code was actually reviewed, but I imagine existence itself is also used in some cases.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I get a resume for someone I've been asked to interview, I'll certainly look at any github profiles, and if there's something relevant there, I'll often use their project as a basis for whatever coding exercise we do, such as extend this class to add X functionality. Or use it as a basis for design questions.

A nonstandard interview process like this is illegal in some jurisdictions. It may run afoul of US law too, depending on the outcomes. It is safer and easier to use a one size fits all interview.

Except it's pretty much standard. If there isn't a github link, I'm still going to tailor the programming questions to a context that I infer from the past experience on their resume (as in, they said they did X, so they should know about Y) but with a bit less accuracy.

Most of the interview is getting the candidate to show me that they know _something_ in depth and I'm not super concerned with exactly what it is. (If they've learned something in depth, I expect they can also learn the details of what we do. :) So the exact same questions to every candidate serves no one's interests.

Re: The black market in GitHub stars

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nonstandard interview process like this is illegal in some jurisdictions. It may run afoul of US law too, depending on the outcomes. It is safer and easier to use a one size fits all interview.

Except it's pretty much standard. If there isn't a github link, I'm still going to tailor the programming questions to a context that I infer from the past experience on their resume (as in, they said they did X, so they should know about Y) but with a bit less accuracy. Most of the interview is getting the candidate to show me that they know _something_ in depth and I'm not super concerned with exactly what it is. (…

I think the nuance here is if you tailor ALL interviews for a specific job based on each candidate to the point where the interviews are no longer directly comparable, that could constitute a hiring practice that would run afoul of some laws in various places.

However, what you're describing sounds reasonable to me - you're offering the same overall interview structure, just tailoring the question to delve more into someone's bespoke experience. That's a hell of a lot more work than a one size fits all (ala leetcoding style) question - kudos to you.

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