this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
57 points (83.5% liked)
Programming
17550 readers
208 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Been on GitHub for years now, mostly passive, and have never heard of "stars" people have or get.
Stars don't really do that much, people mostly use it to "favorite" your repo. Or just a general "Upvote" or something
I have a repo with about 1.4k stars, so what it gives you:
Not sure if that affects other searches, like google
Even more stars (apparently like 5k+ or more) gives you
That may be technically true, but sadly in reality things are more complicated.
Developers, especially bad ones, use Stars as an argument for choosing libraries or frameworks, for example. Organizations tend to favor those repositories / libraries / frameworks when picking their stacks. People in HR are trained to judge you Github account by the amount of stars that you have. Open Source maintainers who appear popular are often used as poster people for recruiting. The list of ridiculous reasons why stars may matter goes on. Eventually, you will be able to turn a repository with a high star count into money or advancement, because that just how superficial the world we live in actually functions under the hood.
Yea true, if people can vote on something, other people will use those votes as metrics for how good something is
My perspective was more about what they actually do. Not the meta-effects they might have socially
I think you overestimate how much money or advancements you can really get from it though.
Money wise - I can't find an overview of "Most Sponsored github repos" - but it's pretty bare. I checked to see if I could find any example, for example if you look at FluentAssertions - A project that basically everyone uses, has 292.6 Million total downloads on Nuget. If you check their sponsers - they currently have 17. Assuming their the lowest tier, you're getting $85 a month. Which is cool, I guess, but a neglectable amount for a developer with a normal job
And advancements wise - any actually good developer doesn't really have a problem getting a good job - And any good company reviewing a candidate might fool the HR by buying stars, but a dev reviewer or something will actually look though the code won't care much about stars
True, but I'd assume developers who are actually good also don't buy stars on Github. Sadly, the demand on the market over the last five to ten years meant that everyone with a udemi course in react could get job as a developer. Now that the economy does not look all that rosy, that is changing and people are looking for new ways to "boost" their CVs.