I think that refers to the Wired article http://www.wired.com/2014/07/cockroachdb/

With the tag being sign of pedigree. "A scalable DB from people who worked at a place with huge scale DBs".

Whether it is very convincing or not is another matter, but I am sure it gets more clicks/attention

Yes, it's called social proof. If you're observant you'll notice that people use it everywhere. Of course, social proof doesn't mean guarantees.

Nah, it's honor-by-association fallacy. Social proof is a behavioral thing, not false reasoning.

Yeah, I feel a bit uncomfortable about using the brand of a previous employer so prominently to promote a different project

Haven't you noticed the pedigree obsession of some in our field?

In this context it adds more signal than noise. There are zillions of open source projects but when you need to use them in production a very small subset of this universe is ready.

Does it? I don't think ex-Googlers gives anything of value here.

It indicates that the project is worth a closer look rather than waiting or dismissing it outright.

Why? Being an ex-googler could just as easily imply they were incompetent and fired.

> It indicates that the project is worth a closer look rather than waiting or dismissing it outright. reply

I'm curious, could you explain why? Google is an incredibly large company with many developers who never even touch their data systems so to me saying ex-Googler really doesn't mean anything beyond that they're probably a senior developer considering how rigorous (and honestly some old hat) their interview process is. But that doesn't change my viewpoint of the project at all.

I was kind of put off by this as well. Does where they worked in the past have anything to do with how useful the project is now or how talented the people are? What if they're doing it on their own because Google thought the project was useless? What if they were fired from Google, or only worked at Google for a month? How does the founders' past involvement with Google mark this project as any more interesting than any other random "Show HN" project?

It is a pretty strange title. Some might interpret it as they started this project after being fired from Google.

That's kind of how I read it.

I don't think it matters how you try to promote an open source project. The code will ultimately be the determining factor whether the project can support a following. And everyone has access to the code to make that determination independently.

That seems rather naive to me. No one is scouring GitHub looking for quality code and bringing unrecognized projects to light.

My point is not that unfound projects will necessarily become found. No matter how good they are. Instead the idea is that no matter how a project is promoted, ultimately they only have their code-base to back their claims.

A requirement of a successful project/product is visibility. Ex-Googlers does not imply much more then "used to work there" but if it drives more attention to them, it's good MarCom.

This was based on an internal Google technology, so the "Ex-Googlers" label is actually quite relevant.

Name-dropping has been common since the first salesman.