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I think I agree with "Followers on GitHub Show Popularity Not Talent" to some small scale, but that example is idiotic, who is going to submit a fictional chara
by belval 6y ago
I think I agree with "Followers on GitHub Show Popularity Not Talent" to some small scale, but that example is idiotic, who is going to submit a fictional character's GitHub profile as their own.
Most of the time when there is +50 people following someone it means that at the very least they have one significant repository, published article or somewhat known through other means (blogs are one).
- croes 6y agoHe doesn't say that someone submitted a fictional characters profile as his own. He says github popularity is a useless metric because even fictional characters have a higher popularity as nearly all github users.
- belval 6y agoSo the reasoning is, due to having outliers that don't actually exist with multiple thousands followers, the metric won't help for hiring? Someone with followers still indicates that at the very least some people are interested in that person's projects.
- MrPowers 6y agoYea, the author performed an argument by selective observation in the followers section. Choosing a GitHub user from a famous TV show to prove his point makes the line of argumentation particularly fallacious. I'd need to crunch the numbers, but would suspect that number of followers is highly correlated with GitHub stars, PyPi / NPM downloads, etc.
- croes 6y agoAs soon as these metrics lead to job success as soon we get fake followers and stars, like on twitter, instagram, etc.
- croes 6y agoIt just indicates that his account has followers. A couple of friends or some fake accounts and everbody cam have followers. The pure existence of followers says nothing just like everywhere else.
- prepend 6y agoI think the point is that people follow profiles for arbitrary reasons, not because they are great programmers.
- MrPowers 6y agoI follow people that are great programmers personally. I find that the famous open source programmers are typically the ones with the most followers: * BurntSushi: 4.4k followers * wesm: 9.6k followers * tj: 43.6k followers The followers section of the post may have cherry picked a non-representative example.
- saagarjha 6y agoFollowers on GitHub is nothing but a popularity contest. I know, because until recently I had like a dozen followers, mostly people I knew, some prolific followers, and a handful of people who actually probably did so because they enjoyed my work. Then I wrote a couple of blog posts about Homebrew and companies choosing their tech stacks and suddenly I had a hundred new people following me-not because they thought my code was any good, but presumably because they enjoyed my writing, which had essentially nothing to do with the kinds of things I put on GitHub. (I hope they’re not disappointed, to be honest.) If you look at highly-followed accounts, they are always people who write giant “awesome” lists, or maybe have a substantial Twitter presence, or are the primary maintainer of one popular project. There’s a huge number of highly-skilled people who have essentially no followers at all.