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I got interested in contributing to Firefox in the hopes that it would lead to a job. My thought was since obviously I could do the job, then they would hire m

I got interested in contributing to Firefox in the hopes that it would lead to a job. My thought was since obviously I could do the job, then they would hire me without having to go through the usual interviewing steps. Every time I have applied, I never got pass the recruiter. Never got a call to talk about my patches, just a generic rejection response. Then I realized that I was spending too much effort on a single company, so I stopped contributing and applying. Seems leetcode grinding would be a higher reward for the effort.

megous 7y ago
Nice of you to contribute. Was it helpful to get a job elsewhere? Navigating a big codebase and adding/fixing things seems like a good skill to have demonstrated.
timClicks 7y ago
I've never worked for Mozilla, but I have found that contacting current staff and asking for a referral is a good way to get past the initial screen.
paulluuk 7y ago
Imagine doing free work for a company to prove that you could do the same work for a salary, and then not even getting to talk to the recruiter. What a great time to be alive.
- dfcmt 7y ago
  Well, that was his prerogative. I don't think it's the standard.
- danso 7y ago
  Speaking for myself, I’ll put in time on contributing to a codebase when that codebase is something I use and like. I’ll include links to significant contributions when someone wants to see my OSS experience. If it helps in their decision process, great. If not, I still got what I wanted, which is to better understand something I use and, to a lesser degree, improve it.
- Millennium 7y ago
  When it comes down to it, nothing ever entitles you to face time. You put stuff out and hope for the best, but it's always a risk. Nothing is guaranteed.
Iv 7y ago
Having this in your portfolio is not a way to succeed in HR interviews, it is a way to bypass them totally.
- hu3 7y ago
  Are you saying that having previous Open-Source contributions to Mozilla in the portfolio would mean you're not going to have a chance with a job there? edit: I'd love to be wrong here. Feel free to correct me instead of just downvoting.
  - pferde 7y ago
    GP was saying that you can avoid talking to the useless HR drones and get in touch with someone more technical at the company, and have them recommend you for a position, based on your contributions.
ivanbakel 7y ago
>My thought was since obviously I could do the job, then they would hire me without having to go through the usual interviewing steps. I would certainly hope not. It's one thing to fast-track from an internship or a coding camp, but any company that would be willing to do that for an open-source contributor who's never been interacted with in a professional environment would have serious problems with its hiring standards.
- hu3 7y ago
  From what I gather you're either: 1) Assuming it would be OP's first job. 2) Requiring previous professional interaction before even a job interview. Both seems weird to me and I'm grateful my first company didn't have those requirements for hiring.
- neilv 7y ago
  Depends on what you skip. If it's already obvious that someone can code, then parts like leetcode look like either dimwitted corporate inflexibility, or a transparent hazing power play. It seems like the majority of people in supposedly innovative dotcoms have oddly lumbering-big-corporate-drone ideas about this right now. Someone thinks they shouldn't have do to a distracting battery of whiteboard leetcode hazing, when obviously they can code, and they're happy to have real technical discussions-- and we're turned off by their prima donna arrogance. Their failure to comply with every unreasonable or abusive corporate demand is a showstopper. (That sounds like the kind of person who might object if they find out our entire business model is secretly spying on people and controlling them!) If the applicant further suggested that they also would like some basis for evaluating their prospective team members (just normally; not whiteboard hazing them), we'd totally flip out, and for years later would be mocking the arrogance of that one uppity jerk, who don't appreciate how our revered VC fore-funders commanded us, over 10 years ago, how software development culture works.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  Internship sure, but how on Earth does a code bootcamp rank above actual contributions as an indicator of professional conduct?
rxhernandez 7y ago
That's really weird. They reached out to me to do R&D with them and the work I did at that point in my life couldn't be further from what they do. I dont think there's very much rhyme or reason to getting people to contact you for a sw engineering position. I've had Google, Amazon, Stanford University and a host of other prestigious places reach out to me and go in good directions. On the other hand, I have never heard so much as a peep from Microsoft or Intel despite dozens of applications. I had friends that got into Microsoft right out of college and their programming ability wasn't above average nor were their social skills that much better. I have friends that I worked with that were at Intel and they complained that they could have done their job straight out of high school; conversely, most of my work up until recently required graduate level math.
dao- 7y ago
This is how I got hired but that was many years ago. Getting hired wasn't even my intention, I just wanted to contribute. Mozilla has become bigger and things are more formal now. It's certainly still a big plus if you're part of the community and can let your work speak for itself, even more so if you captured someone's attention who'd like to get you hired, but you most likely won't be able to skip the interview process.
GrigoriyMikh 7y ago
I made some contributions(not very much, to be honest) to big open source projects. Was interviewed about 10 times in recent few months, and not a single interviewer was aware about my contributions to OS, despite that there's link to my GitHub in my resume. Also, when i mention my contributions to OS, interviewers usually not interested in that.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  It's remarkably much work to discover the significant and relevant contributions someone did to OSS just from their github profile. Lots of people have forked millions of well known projects. No interviewer has time to go through all of them to find the ones that were forked for good reason, i.e. to make amazing PRs and not just to fool around a bit. Also, the contributions graphic (with the colored boxes) is often off-putting, because many people tend to also use GH for random weekend hacks, which are shown as "contributions" just as much as "oh I made Firefox 2x faster on BSD" kind of things are. To GitHub, a commit is just a commit, and "I ran create-react-app" and "Fixed impossible 10 year old race condition in Hadoop" are both shown as a green box. Spell out your relevant OSS contributions in your CV and/or your email. Don't just link to your GitHub profile, GitHub profiles are shit. To be honest, if you only link to your GH and then conclude that interviewers aren't interested in your open source work, then this gives me the idea that you're not that interested in your interviewers either. Help them out a bit!
- adrianmsmith 7y ago
  I interviewed at three companies over the course of a few weeks once, not one asked me about anything on my GitHub profile nor about my blog (200+ technical articles). I was a bit miffed. At the last one I asked to see the CV they’d been given; the recruiter had removed those links from my CV. (This was in Austria.) So had I worked on open-source or blogged solely to get a job, it would have been a complete waste of time.
- watwut 7y ago
  Overwhelming majority of people have no contributions or only small ones. Most people github profiles are a bunch of plat projects. The companies won't hunt on github. I don't think it does all that much difference even if they know about said contributions.
jfk13 7y ago
If you've made a number of contributions to a project such as Firefox, there should be existing employees or senior project members who are familiar with your work (having reviewed your patches, etc.) Asking those people if they'd consider recommending you for an open position might then be a way forward.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  Yes! Start with the people who did the code reviews for your patches, since they are in the best position to judge your ability.
rvz 7y ago
Depending on how significant your patches are (No hello-world-123/typo/style fixes) putting 'Contributed to the Firefox Browser' on your CV/Cover letter and I find your email in the source code or AUTHORS file is a instant on-site from me. You don't need to show me that you can program/write tests or use version control. This saves me lots of time on finding candidates that are experienced, rather than throwing a leetcode/hackerrank puzzle which can be easily cheated or plagiarized. I think I might have said this before on another HN thread, but of course as an interviewer, I sometimes double-check the CVs and candidates to look for 'hidden qualities' such as open-source contributions. If one recruiter overlooks a candidate, I really ask them why and if the candidate DOES have significant and relevant patches, I actually bypass their decision and I bring them in onsite. I find these technical programming tests useless for finding qualified candidates unless you are preparing for a programming olympiad or some other competitive programming competition. But open-source contributions allows me to find the patches you made on code reviewing tickets and see it in the open. It would be better if more companies used open-source contributions as acceptable evidence of relevant experience these days.
- GrigoriyMikh 7y ago
  Unfortunately, that's not how big company recruitment processes work: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
  - rvz 7y ago
    Well, he was invited for a on-site interview at Google rather than being a direct hire. But after this rejection, Apple directly hired him to work with the Xcode team. In both cases he bypassed the recruiter and leetcode stages which are common steps before the on-site interview at most companies.
  - martius 7y ago
    (disclamer: I'm a noogler, and I failed google on-site once). I think that citing this example every time "hiring at Google/Big tech" is discussed on HN is useless. We know that there are a lot of false negative and and lot of chance in the hiring process (so many things can fail in a process involving so many steps and people). There are also legitimate rejections, like hm, bold statements ("90% of your engineers use my software"), fingerpointing or not being able to seek for assistance when you don't know something. I discussed interviews with many people, and I'm convinced that solving the problem with the theoretically-optimal solution is not the only way to get a positive review. Being open about things I didn't know helped me: for instance "Hm, I'm not sure about how to do this exact thing, I'll use the function do_this_thing() and implement it later if I still have time, if that's OK for you" buys you time and allows to keep the discussion focused on the main problem.
_pmf_ 7y ago
Maybe you need to work on your diversity story? Make sure to have a rainbow flag and pronouns in your social media profiles.
- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  Is there some back-story here that I'm not aware of? Otherwise this just comes off as borderline homophobic.
  - GrigoriyMikh 7y ago
    I'm assuming OP is being sarcasstic
  - gnode 7y ago
    I think it was just an insinuation of reverse discrimination in Mozilla's hiring process.
nguoi 7y ago
On that note, why should someone want to contribute to a project controlled by a single company if they don't need those contributions for their business? Many open source projects are far removed from the ideal of a disjoint group hackers making something nice in their own time. Contributors to Firefox, Chromium, Linux, etc. are usually paid to do work to enable things that the company they work for want[1]. If your contributions are significant but don't further those goals, you may be unable to get them merged. In my opinion, don't devalue your own work when you could spend it on a project of your own, or a smaller project that's genuinely a community effort. [1] Mozilla, Google (& many from Ubuntu), Intel
- lonelappde 7y ago
  I can't find a logical interpretation of this comment. It seems to conflate unrelated issues of open source ad companies. How does company interest in an open source hurt you? Why can't a corporation be part of the community? How is that in any way against an ideal? You can fork Firefox if Mozilla rejects your patches. Even small community hacker project maintainers can reject patches, and you can form of you don't like that. IMO, don't devalue your work by refusing to work on a project with millions of users and preferring unpopular low impact projects.
millisecond 7y ago
My hunch is that you have a blind spot that’s getting you flagged at the recruiter stage. I’ve interviewed a ton of devs, I’d be happy to run through a sample interview and give you feedback if you’re up for it.
- thejj100100 7y ago
  I’ve never had a job interview before. What kind of things should be focused on when preparing for one? (I’ve still got a few years yet until I need to start thinking about jobs though.) I personally feel my confidence is a big weakness, but I guess that’s different to technical ability. Should I start with learning different algorithms, data structures, etc? Thanks
  - millisecond 7y ago
    You need all of that (structures, algorithms, confidence, etc), especially if you're going for a FAANG. But the biggest thing I see new grads lacking is the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively in the workplace and on teams. At most smaller startups that's maybe even more important than raw ability. Find any way you can to gain practical experience. Internships, consulting, open-source. Really anything. The bonus is that you'll gain confidence through this path as well. You'll know you're capable of doing the full job (not just the work).
- microDude 7y ago
  Wow. Great community here on HN. Kudos to you.

megous 7y ago

Nice of you to contribute. Was it helpful to get a job elsewhere? Navigating a big codebase and adding/fixing things seems like a good skill to have demonstrated.

timClicks 7y ago

I've never worked for Mozilla, but I have found that contacting current staff and asking for a referral is a good way to get past the initial screen.

paulluuk 7y ago

Imagine doing free work for a company to prove that you could do the same work for a salary, and then not even getting to talk to the recruiter. What a great time to be alive.

dfcmt 7y ago
Well, that was his prerogative. I don't think it's the standard.
danso 7y ago
Speaking for myself, I’ll put in time on contributing to a codebase when that codebase is something I use and like. I’ll include links to significant contributions when someone wants to see my OSS experience. If it helps in their decision process, great. If not, I still got what I wanted, which is to better understand something I use and, to a lesser degree, improve it.
Millennium 7y ago
When it comes down to it, nothing ever entitles you to face time. You put stuff out and hope for the best, but it's always a risk. Nothing is guaranteed.

Iv 7y ago

Having this in your portfolio is not a way to succeed in HR interviews, it is a way to bypass them totally.

hu3 7y ago
Are you saying that having previous Open-Source contributions to Mozilla in the portfolio would mean you're not going to have a chance with a job there? edit: I'd love to be wrong here. Feel free to correct me instead of just downvoting.
- pferde 7y ago
  GP was saying that you can avoid talking to the useless HR drones and get in touch with someone more technical at the company, and have them recommend you for a position, based on your contributions.

ivanbakel 7y ago

>My thought was since obviously I could do the job, then they would hire me without having to go through the usual interviewing steps. I would certainly hope not. It's one thing to fast-track from an internship or a coding camp, but any company that would be willing to do that for an open-source contributor who's never been interacted with in a professional environment would have serious problems with its hiring standards.

hu3 7y ago
From what I gather you're either: 1) Assuming it would be OP's first job. 2) Requiring previous professional interaction before even a job interview. Both seems weird to me and I'm grateful my first company didn't have those requirements for hiring.
neilv 7y ago
Depends on what you skip. If it's already obvious that someone can code, then parts like leetcode look like either dimwitted corporate inflexibility, or a transparent hazing power play. It seems like the majority of people in supposedly innovative dotcoms have oddly lumbering-big-corporate-drone ideas about this right now. Someone thinks they shouldn't have do to a distracting battery of whiteboard leetcode hazing, when obviously they can code, and they're happy to have real technical discussions-- and we're turned off by their prima donna arrogance. Their failure to comply with every unreasonable or abusive corporate demand is a showstopper. (That sounds like the kind of person who might object if they find out our entire business model is secretly spying on people and controlling them!) If the applicant further suggested that they also would like some basis for evaluating their prospective team members (just normally; not whiteboard hazing them), we'd totally flip out, and for years later would be mocking the arrogance of that one uppity jerk, who don't appreciate how our revered VC fore-funders commanded us, over 10 years ago, how software development culture works.
0xffff2 7y ago
Internship sure, but how on Earth does a code bootcamp rank above actual contributions as an indicator of professional conduct?

rxhernandez 7y ago

That's really weird. They reached out to me to do R&D with them and the work I did at that point in my life couldn't be further from what they do. I dont think there's very much rhyme or reason to getting people to contact you for a sw engineering position. I've had Google, Amazon, Stanford University and a host of other prestigious places reach out to me and go in good directions. On the other hand, I have never heard so much as a peep from Microsoft or Intel despite dozens of applications. I had friends that got into Microsoft right out of college and their programming ability wasn't above average nor were their social skills that much better. I have friends that I worked with that were at Intel and they complained that they could have done their job straight out of high school; conversely, most of my work up until recently required graduate level math.

dao- 7y ago

This is how I got hired but that was many years ago. Getting hired wasn't even my intention, I just wanted to contribute. Mozilla has become bigger and things are more formal now. It's certainly still a big plus if you're part of the community and can let your work speak for itself, even more so if you captured someone's attention who'd like to get you hired, but you most likely won't be able to skip the interview process.

GrigoriyMikh 7y ago

I made some contributions(not very much, to be honest) to big open source projects. Was interviewed about 10 times in recent few months, and not a single interviewer was aware about my contributions to OS, despite that there's link to my GitHub in my resume. Also, when i mention my contributions to OS, interviewers usually not interested in that.

skrebbel 7y ago
It's remarkably much work to discover the significant and relevant contributions someone did to OSS just from their github profile. Lots of people have forked millions of well known projects. No interviewer has time to go through all of them to find the ones that were forked for good reason, i.e. to make amazing PRs and not just to fool around a bit. Also, the contributions graphic (with the colored boxes) is often off-putting, because many people tend to also use GH for random weekend hacks, which are shown as "contributions" just as much as "oh I made Firefox 2x faster on BSD" kind of things are. To GitHub, a commit is just a commit, and "I ran create-react-app" and "Fixed impossible 10 year old race condition in Hadoop" are both shown as a green box. Spell out your relevant OSS contributions in your CV and/or your email. Don't just link to your GitHub profile, GitHub profiles are shit. To be honest, if you only link to your GH and then conclude that interviewers aren't interested in your open source work, then this gives me the idea that you're not that interested in your interviewers either. Help them out a bit!
adrianmsmith 7y ago
I interviewed at three companies over the course of a few weeks once, not one asked me about anything on my GitHub profile nor about my blog (200+ technical articles). I was a bit miffed. At the last one I asked to see the CV they’d been given; the recruiter had removed those links from my CV. (This was in Austria.) So had I worked on open-source or blogged solely to get a job, it would have been a complete waste of time.
watwut 7y ago
Overwhelming majority of people have no contributions or only small ones. Most people github profiles are a bunch of plat projects. The companies won't hunt on github. I don't think it does all that much difference even if they know about said contributions.

jfk13 7y ago

If you've made a number of contributions to a project such as Firefox, there should be existing employees or senior project members who are familiar with your work (having reviewed your patches, etc.) Asking those people if they'd consider recommending you for an open position might then be a way forward.

bzbarsky 7y ago
Yes! Start with the people who did the code reviews for your patches, since they are in the best position to judge your ability.

rvz 7y ago

Depending on how significant your patches are (No hello-world-123/typo/style fixes) putting 'Contributed to the Firefox Browser' on your CV/Cover letter and I find your email in the source code or AUTHORS file is a instant on-site from me. You don't need to show me that you can program/write tests or use version control. This saves me lots of time on finding candidates that are experienced, rather than throwing a leetcode/hackerrank puzzle which can be easily cheated or plagiarized. I think I might have said this before on another HN thread, but of course as an interviewer, I sometimes double-check the CVs and candidates to look for 'hidden qualities' such as open-source contributions. If one recruiter overlooks a candidate, I really ask them why and if the candidate DOES have significant and relevant patches, I actually bypass their decision and I bring them in onsite. I find these technical programming tests useless for finding qualified candidates unless you are preparing for a programming olympiad or some other competitive programming competition. But open-source contributions allows me to find the patches you made on code reviewing tickets and see it in the open. It would be better if more companies used open-source contributions as acceptable evidence of relevant experience these days.

GrigoriyMikh 7y ago
Unfortunately, that's not how big company recruitment processes work: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
- rvz 7y ago
  Well, he was invited for a on-site interview at Google rather than being a direct hire. But after this rejection, Apple directly hired him to work with the Xcode team. In both cases he bypassed the recruiter and leetcode stages which are common steps before the on-site interview at most companies.
- martius 7y ago
  (disclamer: I'm a noogler, and I failed google on-site once). I think that citing this example every time "hiring at Google/Big tech" is discussed on HN is useless. We know that there are a lot of false negative and and lot of chance in the hiring process (so many things can fail in a process involving so many steps and people). There are also legitimate rejections, like hm, bold statements ("90% of your engineers use my software"), fingerpointing or not being able to seek for assistance when you don't know something. I discussed interviews with many people, and I'm convinced that solving the problem with the theoretically-optimal solution is not the only way to get a positive review. Being open about things I didn't know helped me: for instance "Hm, I'm not sure about how to do this exact thing, I'll use the function do_this_thing() and implement it later if I still have time, if that's OK for you" buys you time and allows to keep the discussion focused on the main problem.

_pmf_ 7y ago

Maybe you need to work on your diversity story? Make sure to have a rainbow flag and pronouns in your social media profiles.

VBprogrammer 7y ago
Is there some back-story here that I'm not aware of? Otherwise this just comes off as borderline homophobic.
- GrigoriyMikh 7y ago
  I'm assuming OP is being sarcasstic
- gnode 7y ago
  I think it was just an insinuation of reverse discrimination in Mozilla's hiring process.

nguoi 7y ago

On that note, why should someone want to contribute to a project controlled by a single company if they don't need those contributions for their business? Many open source projects are far removed from the ideal of a disjoint group hackers making something nice in their own time. Contributors to Firefox, Chromium, Linux, etc. are usually paid to do work to enable things that the company they work for want[1]. If your contributions are significant but don't further those goals, you may be unable to get them merged. In my opinion, don't devalue your own work when you could spend it on a project of your own, or a smaller project that's genuinely a community effort. [1] Mozilla, Google (& many from Ubuntu), Intel

lonelappde 7y ago
I can't find a logical interpretation of this comment. It seems to conflate unrelated issues of open source ad companies. How does company interest in an open source hurt you? Why can't a corporation be part of the community? How is that in any way against an ideal? You can fork Firefox if Mozilla rejects your patches. Even small community hacker project maintainers can reject patches, and you can form of you don't like that. IMO, don't devalue your work by refusing to work on a project with millions of users and preferring unpopular low impact projects.

millisecond 7y ago

My hunch is that you have a blind spot that’s getting you flagged at the recruiter stage. I’ve interviewed a ton of devs, I’d be happy to run through a sample interview and give you feedback if you’re up for it.

thejj100100 7y ago
I’ve never had a job interview before. What kind of things should be focused on when preparing for one? (I’ve still got a few years yet until I need to start thinking about jobs though.) I personally feel my confidence is a big weakness, but I guess that’s different to technical ability. Should I start with learning different algorithms, data structures, etc? Thanks
- millisecond 7y ago
  You need all of that (structures, algorithms, confidence, etc), especially if you're going for a FAANG. But the biggest thing I see new grads lacking is the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively in the workplace and on teams. At most smaller startups that's maybe even more important than raw ability. Find any way you can to gain practical experience. Internships, consulting, open-source. Really anything. The bonus is that you'll gain confidence through this path as well. You'll know you're capable of doing the full job (not just the work).
microDude 7y ago
Wow. Great community here on HN. Kudos to you.