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> “But what are GitHub stars?” This is weird. It’s almost as if this is a sales pitch to non-technical management who gets to make the executive decision on wh

> “But what are GitHub stars?” This is weird. It’s almost as if this is a sales pitch to non-technical management who gets to make the executive decision on what issue tracker to use. That’s almost antithetical to “by engineers, for engineers” If this project is driven by commercial interests, then the open-source spirit, if any, isn’t genuine and won’t stick around once VCs want the bait-and-switch. Edit: the blog post goes at length to discuss growth hacking and “engagement”. The reason Jira is the mess it is is because they tried to accommodate the feature request of every paying customer Edit 2: seems they are logging telemetry by default https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1694 https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1694 Edit 3: it’s possible this engagement story is to impress VC / funding first, paying customers second Edit 4: I’m starting to see the other commentary about plagiarizing Linear in a different light, now that I’m cynical about the ethics and honesty of this project. All the non trivial contributors are exclusively from a country known for Infosys, clickfarms for social media engagement, gamifying the interview/recruitment funnel (see Grace Hopper convention). If this was a truly global crowd source effort as the GitHub stars would make you believe, you’d expect to see more geographical diversity. There’s a point where GitHub stars isn’t just a weak signal, but a negative one

solarkraft 3y ago
It's not necessarily antithetical. You can build for engineers, but target management for sales - since those people often make the decisions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
darkwater 3y ago
What do you prefer? A software whose UI and workflow are good for upper management but a PITA for engineers, or a software "by engineers, for engineers" which has some sales pitch/material that can be appealing to upper management, who ultimately makes the decision to shell out the money?
- alephnan 3y ago
  There’s other options. 37signals and BaseCamp built products that works for their own processes based on their experience as a software team. They productized it and sold it. I’m not contesting that the product couldn’t be sold. The issue here is bring driven by growth engagement, giving this impression that it’s about listening to the community. My cynism is that that they don’t care about what makes most sense for the product, but what drives engagement. You can argue what drives engagement is best for the users. That idea is good in theory, but in practice trying to satisfy everyone’s need you will end up not serving any use case well. Go, atleast Go 1, make explicit trade offs that made many people dislike it, but it kept the language simple and excelled at its intended use case. At any rate, I am cynical that the project here is driven by developer interest as much as it is about impressing VCs.
prepend 3y ago
I read it as addressing the “who cares about stars” that I have whenever someone mentions stars. So it was like a developer saying “I know stars are a dumb and imperfect way to judge a project, but here’s what it is.” If they hadn’t written this I would think they put too much weight on what’s really not a very important measure.
- alephnan 3y ago
  The problem isn’t that stars are imperfect, but they have become gamified. The emphasis on GitHub stars as a form of authority makes me trust this project even less. You’d expect VCs to do due diligence on the authenticity and quality of GitHub reviews, but I’m dubious about that, whether they are doing so out of willful ignorance or not is a separate question. All of the contributors on this project are from the country that feeds to Infosys. I’ve seen enough inflated resumes from candidates who couldn’t write a loop despite having a masters degree. Ironically, the one candidate from this country I gave raving recommendations for was the one who had bad school grades. This country is also a hotbed for clickfarms and selling fake social media engagement/reviews.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I agree on the gamification, but I think they are still useful. I mean this project has 18k stars that just tells me it’s popular. It’s possible they bought fake stars but at 18k that would be strange. I think stars are useless for comparing a 17k project to an 18k project and anyone comparing that way would be flagged by me as not so smart. But it is useful to distinguish something with just a few stars from thousands. The challenge is that there’s not really a good way to tell what a successful project is short of looking at it closely and using it. I’d like a better measure, but this is what we have.
    - alephnan 3y ago
      Originally, Amazon was great because the most popular/reviewed products were usually the best one. The opposite has become true. For a while, websites like fakepsot.com that analyzed and rated the credibility of these reviews worked well. Since then, they've been gamed. I'm not sure there's been a successful service for analyzing Github reviews
SadCordDrone 3y ago
> All the non trivial contributors are exclusively from a country known for Infosys, clickfarms for social media engagement, gamifying the interview/recruitment funnel (see Grace Hopper convention) I see your other points are valid but this was uncalled for. The person who commented the telemetry issue (Kailash Nadh) is also from India and CTO of largest stock broker, he is also known for encouraging open source software. A large amount of contributors to GSoC and LFX programs are Indian college students. All the dysfunctions you mention are symptoms of large population - of which I too have been a victim of. But I have seen some very good engineers in this country too.
- alephnan 3y ago
  > All the dysfunctions you mention are symptoms of large population - of which I too have been a victim of. But I have seen some very good engineers in this country too. Me too. One of the best Indian candidates I interviewed was the one who had the worst college grades... probably because they focused on internalizing the material and actual problem solving. The other candidates all studied Leetcode, and was dumbfounded when asked a simple, non Leetcode question. The question was to bruteforce and guest a password to a website. I provide them the API definition to Login with a Username and Password. All they had to do was generate every possible password between 8 and 20 characters. There is no rate limiting and we don't care about optimality or runtime. The only tricky bit is that there are a variety of business/password words such as password strings can't start with a number. If they call the API with 5 passwords that don't satisfy the password rules, they get locked out. This isn't worded as a Leetcode problem, but it's really just generating every permutation and filter out strings that don't match some condition checks (which I enumerate for them. It's not a blackbox). Asking people to program against this API: boolean login(username: String, password: String) was enough to trip up these people with Masters degree. The problem with people cheating the system is that it harms candidates like this.
  - SadCordDrone 3y ago
    I am sure college grads (from decent Indian colleg) can solve this one. The problem is they have done leetcode style of puzzles all their college life. - mostly control flow, numbers and DP / greedy / graph patterns. Which is such narrow area of computer science. They don't understand basics of - operating systems (eg: VMs), compilers (eg: compiled vs source code, optimization), languages (eg: type systems), networks (eg: NAT, firewall), software engineering (eg: writing modular code, version control). All these things are as Computer Science as leetcode algorithms. These are in the syllabus, at least in a primitive form. But these kids are only tested on leetcode puzzles. Ask anything deep on these and watch these DSA-generation kids struggle.

solarkraft 3y ago

It's not necessarily antithetical. You can build for engineers, but target management for sales - since those people often make the decisions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

darkwater 3y ago

What do you prefer? A software whose UI and workflow are good for upper management but a PITA for engineers, or a software "by engineers, for engineers" which has some sales pitch/material that can be appealing to upper management, who ultimately makes the decision to shell out the money?

alephnan 3y ago
There’s other options. 37signals and BaseCamp built products that works for their own processes based on their experience as a software team. They productized it and sold it. I’m not contesting that the product couldn’t be sold. The issue here is bring driven by growth engagement, giving this impression that it’s about listening to the community. My cynism is that that they don’t care about what makes most sense for the product, but what drives engagement. You can argue what drives engagement is best for the users. That idea is good in theory, but in practice trying to satisfy everyone’s need you will end up not serving any use case well. Go, atleast Go 1, make explicit trade offs that made many people dislike it, but it kept the language simple and excelled at its intended use case. At any rate, I am cynical that the project here is driven by developer interest as much as it is about impressing VCs.

prepend 3y ago

I read it as addressing the “who cares about stars” that I have whenever someone mentions stars. So it was like a developer saying “I know stars are a dumb and imperfect way to judge a project, but here’s what it is.” If they hadn’t written this I would think they put too much weight on what’s really not a very important measure.

alephnan 3y ago
The problem isn’t that stars are imperfect, but they have become gamified. The emphasis on GitHub stars as a form of authority makes me trust this project even less. You’d expect VCs to do due diligence on the authenticity and quality of GitHub reviews, but I’m dubious about that, whether they are doing so out of willful ignorance or not is a separate question. All of the contributors on this project are from the country that feeds to Infosys. I’ve seen enough inflated resumes from candidates who couldn’t write a loop despite having a masters degree. Ironically, the one candidate from this country I gave raving recommendations for was the one who had bad school grades. This country is also a hotbed for clickfarms and selling fake social media engagement/reviews.
- prepend 3y ago
  I agree on the gamification, but I think they are still useful. I mean this project has 18k stars that just tells me it’s popular. It’s possible they bought fake stars but at 18k that would be strange. I think stars are useless for comparing a 17k project to an 18k project and anyone comparing that way would be flagged by me as not so smart. But it is useful to distinguish something with just a few stars from thousands. The challenge is that there’s not really a good way to tell what a successful project is short of looking at it closely and using it. I’d like a better measure, but this is what we have.
  - alephnan 3y ago
    Originally, Amazon was great because the most popular/reviewed products were usually the best one. The opposite has become true. For a while, websites like fakepsot.com that analyzed and rated the credibility of these reviews worked well. Since then, they've been gamed. I'm not sure there's been a successful service for analyzing Github reviews

SadCordDrone 3y ago

> All the non trivial contributors are exclusively from a country known for Infosys, clickfarms for social media engagement, gamifying the interview/recruitment funnel (see Grace Hopper convention) I see your other points are valid but this was uncalled for. The person who commented the telemetry issue (Kailash Nadh) is also from India and CTO of largest stock broker, he is also known for encouraging open source software. A large amount of contributors to GSoC and LFX programs are Indian college students. All the dysfunctions you mention are symptoms of large population - of which I too have been a victim of. But I have seen some very good engineers in this country too.

alephnan 3y ago
> All the dysfunctions you mention are symptoms of large population - of which I too have been a victim of. But I have seen some very good engineers in this country too. Me too. One of the best Indian candidates I interviewed was the one who had the worst college grades... probably because they focused on internalizing the material and actual problem solving. The other candidates all studied Leetcode, and was dumbfounded when asked a simple, non Leetcode question. The question was to bruteforce and guest a password to a website. I provide them the API definition to Login with a Username and Password. All they had to do was generate every possible password between 8 and 20 characters. There is no rate limiting and we don't care about optimality or runtime. The only tricky bit is that there are a variety of business/password words such as password strings can't start with a number. If they call the API with 5 passwords that don't satisfy the password rules, they get locked out. This isn't worded as a Leetcode problem, but it's really just generating every permutation and filter out strings that don't match some condition checks (which I enumerate for them. It's not a blackbox). Asking people to program against this API: boolean login(username: String, password: String) was enough to trip up these people with Masters degree. The problem with people cheating the system is that it harms candidates like this.
- SadCordDrone 3y ago
  I am sure college grads (from decent Indian colleg) can solve this one. The problem is they have done leetcode style of puzzles all their college life. - mostly control flow, numbers and DP / greedy / graph patterns. Which is such narrow area of computer science. They don't understand basics of - operating systems (eg: VMs), compilers (eg: compiled vs source code, optimization), languages (eg: type systems), networks (eg: NAT, firewall), software engineering (eg: writing modular code, version control). All these things are as Computer Science as leetcode algorithms. These are in the syllabus, at least in a primitive form. But these kids are only tested on leetcode puzzles. Ask anything deep on these and watch these DSA-generation kids struggle.