zlacker

>>kaeruc+(OP)
> Yet [GitHub stars] influence serious, high stakes decisions, including which projects get used by enterprises, which startups get funded, and which companies talented professionals join.

Really? I honestly just don't believe this... if I were to believe this, I think I'd have to conclude the world is just too broken to bother rescuing.

>>saurik+Bd
One of my stock interview questions asks people how they evaluate 3rd-party dependencies for use in a production environment. So many interviewees respond with GitHub stars as their main or only criterion. It depresses me every time.

>>philbo+he
That's a very interesting question. There are so many things you can look at. How is the documentation? Who are the primary maintainers? How are they funded? What are their motivations? Are the primary maintainers active on Stack Overflow, Reddit, Discord, etc...? How many contributors are there? How does their Github issues page look? What about the Github discussion page? How many maintainers are there total? How many downloads per week on NPM (for JS libraries)? From all of these things - how long do you expect this library to be maintained? And that's just the initial qualification research, nothing about how it will impact the actual code-base.

What did I miss? What's the best answer you've ever heard? How do you evaluate 3rd party dependencies?

>>throw_+Hf
You overlooked what I consider to be the first thing you should check — when was the repository last committed to. There are countless projects that rank high on every other metric, but are essentially abandonware.

>>Ethery+eh
Yeah good point... definitely something I would have checked, forgot to put it in the list. I'm baffled people have trouble coming up with more than "number of stars" for this.

Of course there can be libraries that are more or less "finished", so the last commit/frequency of commits isn't on its own a deciding factor, but in proper context/holistically it is definitely an important metric!

>>throw_+Sh
FWIW, I am not baffled by that, as the vast majority of programmers are not "talented professionals" (which is the specific category of potential employee I was balling at, along with enterprises and venture capital firms). So like, you ask your question, they say "star count", and you don't have to really continue the interview.

(When I was in high school, I used to work for a pre-Internet company that helped people pre-filter interview candidates for ads posted in classified sections of newspapers and what they did was have questions like this that could be asked by people well before they reached your calendar for an interview.)