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Can GitHub stars grab big tech recruiters' attention?

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Anonymous User at Taro Community2 years ago

This is somewhat of a random question and I assume it can only help but do Github stars mean anything to big tech (1k+ stars) and is "gaming" it a good use of time? (By gaming I mean honest accumulation of stars where the project is popular but not technically challenging)

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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    2 years ago

    Yes, I know several examples of engineers who have been hired into top-shelf Big Tech companies from their GitHub contributions. 1,000+ stars on GitHub is a lot. That generally means that your repo is being used by tens of thousands of developers at least (engagement on GitHub is naturally fairly low as it's not social media-ey). If it's a more consumer-facing library, your code could be reaching millions of users through the apps and websites your integrated developers are making.

    By gaming I mean honest accumulation of stars where the project is popular but not technically challenging

    Recruiters have 0 idea what's technically challenging and what's not. They only know what has traction and what doesn't. This is why I tell earlier-in-career engineers who are looking to break into Big Tech to not worry at all about "technical depth": Just make useful stuff people care about. Technical depth is highly subjective, and it's a subject recruiters aren't really equipped to digest.

    I actually have fairly related personal experience here:

    • I didn't make big open-source libraries, but I did make a lot of free Android apps.
    • I have many apps that got 100,000+ installs with 2,500+ reviews (mostly 5 stars).
    • The apps were pretty simple, not what you would consider to be "technically challenging":
      • One app was called "Random Name Picker" and did what the title suggested. It got 1,000,000+ users.
      • Another app did a variety of random number generation (dice rolling, pure RNG, coin flipping). It got 500,000+ users.
    • The developer email connected to those apps is completely separate from all my personal info (so people don't know it's me), but I got recruiter reachouts from Instacart, Uber, Square, and many other very large tech companies that are generally considered top-shelf.

    If you're interested in how I made so many successful apps, I made several videos about it:

GitHub is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. 

Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. It is commonly used to host open source software development projects
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