3 ms·

As someone who maintained popular open source repos for >5 years, not once did I have a recruiter care about it (I made sure to ask!)

abhaynayar 10mo ago
maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later? not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about. I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects. it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.
- fvcffcdddfcfff 10mo ago
  [dead]
Svoka 10mo ago
I hired many many people and never once I cared about GitHub stars. Not even sure what signal it suppose to be.
- abtinf 10mo ago
  Yes, developer/platform advocacy/evangelism.
- minimaxir 10mo ago
  It's a quick signal that the developer is capable of writing and maintaining code that can be used by many others.
  - stronglikedan 10mo ago
    Or that they're just a person who knows how to game stars. As Goodfart says, "When a measure becomes a target, it gets gamed beyond usefulness."
    - minimaxir 10mo ago
      Although commits can be gamed on GitHub, stars are significantly harder to game as they require human accounts to be doing so. You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars.
      - skylurk 10mo ago
        I would not be surprised if you can buy quite a lot of them for cheap.
      - nurettin 10mo ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 > This package costed me 8.19 Euros for 100 stars which is €0.08/star. Shoot for the stars, I guess.
      - latexr 10mo ago
        > You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars. It’s not only feasible, it’s trivial. https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-stars https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-sta...
Agentlien 10mo ago
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars. Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
Sesse__ 10mo ago
I've had recruiters be “impressed by my GitHub profile”, when I didn't have a single project on my GitHub profile.
wting 10mo ago
As a hiring manager that visited every resume Github link because of my FOSS background, >99% of them had nothing of substance (no activity, school projects, etc).
nurettin 10mo ago
I was contacted by a spanish HR agency, they said that my github contained code that they considered an outlier and would like to forward some job applications. Never heard of them since. Maybe scraping github for talent isn't good business.

abhaynayar 10mo ago

maybe not the recruiter but the hiring manager or prospective colleagues who'll interview you later? not the number of stars, but I like looking what people have done online ie GitHub/blog. I feel like it is a nice thing to talk about. I know it's an unpopular opinion these days cause everyone wants work life balance and not work beyond the office but it's always nice to see projects you've worked on it does show some interest. also while one can fake GitHub activity it's hard to fake well thought out and cared for projects. it's easier to fake metrics from your previous jobs like I saved X amount of money for the company or had Y efficiency gains.

fvcffcdddfcfff 10mo ago
[dead]

Svoka 10mo ago

I hired many many people and never once I cared about GitHub stars. Not even sure what signal it suppose to be.

abtinf 10mo ago
Yes, developer/platform advocacy/evangelism.
minimaxir 10mo ago
It's a quick signal that the developer is capable of writing and maintaining code that can be used by many others.
- stronglikedan 10mo ago
  Or that they're just a person who knows how to game stars. As Goodfart says, "When a measure becomes a target, it gets gamed beyond usefulness."
  - minimaxir 10mo ago
    Although commits can be gamed on GitHub, stars are significantly harder to game as they require human accounts to be doing so. You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars.
    - skylurk 10mo ago
      I would not be surprised if you can buy quite a lot of them for cheap.
    - nurettin 10mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 > This package costed me 8.19 Euros for 100 stars which is €0.08/star. Shoot for the stars, I guess.
    - latexr 10mo ago
      > You could game a few stars with sockpuppet accounts, but it's infeasible to game 100+ stars. It’s not only feasible, it’s trivial. https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-stars https://the-guild.dev/blog/judging-open-source-by-github-sta...

Agentlien 10mo ago

I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars. Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.

Sesse__ 10mo ago

I've had recruiters be “impressed by my GitHub profile”, when I didn't have a single project on my GitHub profile.

wting 10mo ago

As a hiring manager that visited every resume Github link because of my FOSS background, >99% of them had nothing of substance (no activity, school projects, etc).

nurettin 10mo ago

I was contacted by a spanish HR agency, they said that my github contained code that they considered an outlier and would like to forward some job applications. Never heard of them since. Maybe scraping github for talent isn't good business.