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> Yet [GitHub stars] influence serious, high stakes decisions, including which projects get used by enterprises, which startups get funded, and which companies

by saurik 4y ago

> Yet [GitHub stars] influence serious, high stakes decisions, including which projects get used by enterprises, which startups get funded, and which companies talented professionals join. Really? I honestly just don't believe this... if I were to believe this, I think I'd have to conclude the world is just too broken to bother rescuing.

rossmohax 4y ago
More than once I've seen when number of stars was an argument to decide whether to pull dependency or write our own.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
People use flawed but easily consumable metrics to make almost all decisions. It takes a lot more effort to collect multiple metrics along different axes, understand the skew/bias of them and make an informed decision. Visibility and ease of consumption are the most important aspects of a metric if you want people to use it.
- saurik 4y ago
  The list in the article, though, was carefully selected to presume competent people doing the decision-making. I totally believe many people use that star count for something... but an "enterprise"? someone investing non-trivial amount should of money? a specifically-"talented professional"? I just find that really difficult to believe. I've sold software to enterprise, I've worked with a number of venture capital funds, and I know a ton of actually-talented professionals... I dare say most of them consider GitHub's social features to be a joke. The enterprises I deal with cared almost exclusively about stuff like license choices, support contract options, and "invoice billing" ;P. The vetting process I've dealt with at VCs was intense, having worked both sides of that situation; and I know multiple people who have worked data science jobs at such firms to try to better select investments. As for a "talented professional", I can pretty much guarantee they are going to look at your codebase, not the number of stars it has, while they evaluate any number of more reasonable things to judge an opportunity on (commute, pay, management style, etc.). A key property of competent deciders is that they aren't using trivial metrics.
philbo 4y ago
One of my stock interview questions asks people how they evaluate 3rd-party dependencies for use in a production environment. So many interviewees respond with GitHub stars as their main or only criterion. It depresses me every time.
- tasuki 4y ago
  It depresses me too, but what else can you do? I check what the docs look like, but if I'm to depend on a thing I'd rather choose something popular than unpopular. GitHub stars, Hackage downloads, StackShare... what else can one check?
- throw_away1525 4y ago
  That's a very interesting question. There are so many things you can look at. How is the documentation? Who are the primary maintainers? How are they funded? What are their motivations? Are the primary maintainers active on Stack Overflow, Reddit, Discord, etc...? How many contributors are there? How does their Github issues page look? What about the Github discussion page? How many maintainers are there total? How many downloads per week on NPM (for JS libraries)? From all of these things - how long do you expect this library to be maintained? And that's just the initial qualification research, nothing about how it will impact the actual code-base. What did I miss? What's the best answer you've ever heard? How do you evaluate 3rd party dependencies?
  - Etheryte 4y ago
    You overlooked what I consider to be the first thing you should check — when was the repository last committed to. There are countless projects that rank high on every other metric, but are essentially abandonware.
    - throw_away1525 4y ago
      Yeah good point... definitely something I would have checked, forgot to put it in the list. I'm baffled people have trouble coming up with more than "number of stars" for this. Of course there can be libraries that are more or less "finished", so the last commit/frequency of commits isn't on its own a deciding factor, but in proper context/holistically it is definitely an important metric!
derivagral 4y ago
Activity on other sites related to finance/coding is similar (seekingalpha likes, for example) and I've gotten organic inbound requests for work periodically scraping such info into... Excel.

by saurik 4y ago

rossmohax 4y ago

More than once I've seen when number of stars was an argument to decide whether to pull dependency or write our own.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

People use flawed but easily consumable metrics to make almost all decisions. It takes a lot more effort to collect multiple metrics along different axes, understand the skew/bias of them and make an informed decision. Visibility and ease of consumption are the most important aspects of a metric if you want people to use it.

saurik 4y ago
The list in the article, though, was carefully selected to presume competent people doing the decision-making. I totally believe many people use that star count for something... but an "enterprise"? someone investing non-trivial amount should of money? a specifically-"talented professional"? I just find that really difficult to believe. I've sold software to enterprise, I've worked with a number of venture capital funds, and I know a ton of actually-talented professionals... I dare say most of them consider GitHub's social features to be a joke. The enterprises I deal with cared almost exclusively about stuff like license choices, support contract options, and "invoice billing" ;P. The vetting process I've dealt with at VCs was intense, having worked both sides of that situation; and I know multiple people who have worked data science jobs at such firms to try to better select investments. As for a "talented professional", I can pretty much guarantee they are going to look at your codebase, not the number of stars it has, while they evaluate any number of more reasonable things to judge an opportunity on (commute, pay, management style, etc.). A key property of competent deciders is that they aren't using trivial metrics.

philbo 4y ago

One of my stock interview questions asks people how they evaluate 3rd-party dependencies for use in a production environment. So many interviewees respond with GitHub stars as their main or only criterion. It depresses me every time.

tasuki 4y ago
It depresses me too, but what else can you do? I check what the docs look like, but if I'm to depend on a thing I'd rather choose something popular than unpopular. GitHub stars, Hackage downloads, StackShare... what else can one check?
throw_away1525 4y ago
That's a very interesting question. There are so many things you can look at. How is the documentation? Who are the primary maintainers? How are they funded? What are their motivations? Are the primary maintainers active on Stack Overflow, Reddit, Discord, etc...? How many contributors are there? How does their Github issues page look? What about the Github discussion page? How many maintainers are there total? How many downloads per week on NPM (for JS libraries)? From all of these things - how long do you expect this library to be maintained? And that's just the initial qualification research, nothing about how it will impact the actual code-base. What did I miss? What's the best answer you've ever heard? How do you evaluate 3rd party dependencies?
- Etheryte 4y ago
  You overlooked what I consider to be the first thing you should check — when was the repository last committed to. There are countless projects that rank high on every other metric, but are essentially abandonware.
  - throw_away1525 4y ago
    Yeah good point... definitely something I would have checked, forgot to put it in the list. I'm baffled people have trouble coming up with more than "number of stars" for this. Of course there can be libraries that are more or less "finished", so the last commit/frequency of commits isn't on its own a deciding factor, but in proper context/holistically it is definitely an important metric!

derivagral 4y ago

Activity on other sites related to finance/coding is similar (seekingalpha likes, for example) and I've gotten organic inbound requests for work periodically scraping such info into... Excel.