For the love of God, add some social functions to gitlab and bitbucket!! And get people to use them!
A recruiter just toss out my application to my dream job since other applicants had "more stars on their git".
A recruiter just toss out my application to my dream job since other applicants had "more stars on their git".
And the company is not your average IT sweatshop (big very sucessful company, names starts with an A).
They might be glad to know she's filtering candidates based on that, because they can talk to her about it. It could lead to you getting an interview.
What's the worst that could happen?
We need them, because creating and maintaining hiring pipelines is a full-time job, but we know (and the recruiters should also know!) that they're working on a best-understanding of the job they're recruiting for, and that best-understanding is not a complete understanding, since they don't do that job. It might have been a miss on their understanding of an explanation, it might have been a miss on whoever communicated the job requirements to them. But if you have a contact outside of the recruiter, you should 100% reach out.
As a side note, recruiters are not on your side, they're on their own side. Don't rely on them for anything, least of all securing your dream job.
"I've never seen this thing, except in this obvious and common case where it happens all the time, but other than that, literally never".
Mate :/
In general, my first step in deciding whether projects are good is to google "<project name> review", and see what other developers and sysadmins have experienced with it.
I have often found that a 5 stars system contains inadequate information density to provide me with guidance on the suitability of one project over another with respect to integrating it into my companies tech stack, although I appreciate that's a personal standpoint and that you may disagree.
A project with lots of stars and rare commits is almost never better than one with a less stars but low-grade continuous activity.
"Date of last commit" is probably FAR higher than any "social" bullshit in terms of quality.
That's the first thing I look at when I arrive on a github page, always.
Buying into and supporting this behavior is just digging an increasingly deep hole. If you don't want github commits (and an agreement to the github terms of use) to be a mandatory part of all developers lives and CVs, then simply continue being an excellent developer without making github commits that you don't want to make.
We're in an important stage of github adoption at the moment. Some recruiters think it's a critical signaling mechanism. If we buy into that, they will seem to be correct, and the companies they recruit for will allow them to continue with their methodology. Soon, they will become correct because all career-oriented developers will feel compelled to work on github based open source projects to the exclusion of other open source projects, even if they don't actually give a shit about the projects they are working on.
However, if the companies they recruit for see high quality developers going to the competition because their recruiters are dismissing people out of hand for not being on github, those companies will eventually tell their recruiters to pull their fingers out and do some proper legwork.
The correct approach is to starve out this behavior while the cost of doing so is relatively low, not buy into it.
The cost is pretty high to bobsam, who didn't have a chance to interview for his dream job.
Not "playing the game" only works if all good developers stop using GitHub, no?
As I said to him in my directly reply to his post, acquiring an interview for ones dream job is a task best not left to others.
In relation to our specific discussion, ultimately one developers loss of their dream job is not a huge cost. We are looking down the barrel of a future where github can pick and choose who is employable and who is not, and therefore who makes key technical decisions at major vendors and who does not, by banning github accounts for political reasons. That has knock on effects for things like key standards decisions, and that's when the costs of refusing to conform start mounting. I basically don't trust companies with that kind of power.
I'm not a fan of recruiters incentivizing "required" side-work. That's the time you dedicate to all other important things in your life (which could be a side project, but it is not in most cases)
I can only assume recruiters very much consider this when they don't know anything else about you.
*Edit: Thanks for the downvote, but seriously - have you? If you haven't - It's more constructive to do that so civilised production direction and development discussion may take place in the official centralised forum rather than having outbursts on HN.
They could whip something together just from their server-side analytics so it was more honest rather than a popularity contest.
Maybe some of these are already implemented and we mostly need to get the devs to use them more frequently?