Can GitHub stars grab big tech recruiters' attention?

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:

• [Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free
• [Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free
• How Alex Made An App That Got 80k+ Users In 1 Month