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On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of

On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’s where they shine. Unfortunately, doing so would exclude many great hires who have done a lot of great work at private companies that doesn’t show up on their GitHub. We’ve also had trouble hiring prolific OSS contributors who spent their days working on OSS contributions instead of doing their job. One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. In my experience, anyone claiming to have a single dimension credential preference for hiring (usually GitHub portfolio, Ivy League education, ex-FAANG) is simply hiring for people who look like themselves. They’re not a good fit for unbiased hiring.

notsuoh 6y ago
Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who may be working full time or more. I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. Maybe it indicates drive to contribute to OSS, maybe technical ability, maybe no hobbies or commitments outside their day job. In our experience it's often the latter, but even so, it's biased against people who don't have the time to contribute even if they desired to do so. So we typically just stick with the resume for actual experience and college coursework, if any, but not the college itself. Using these heuristics we've managed to build a pretty strong pipeline of people with all backgrounds of education or experience.
- Uberphallus 6y ago
  Thank you! When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place. First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process they gimme some "take home assignments" that are a literal week of unpaid work. I've heard of companies that pay for those assignments, but I've never stumbled upon one. I always drop out of that, thinking, "good luck with that particular choice of candidate sampling". I might not have been the best candidate, but most seniors I talk to are turned off by these things as well. Timed coding tests are fine, up to 2-3h, I can squeeze one of those in most weeks. But, and I'm not making it up, "implement this subset of the MQTT spec in your language of choice" as just a step in the hiring process? Hell nah.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the family. I balance open source against things like gardening and house maintenance but gardening and house maintenance only take so much time. The biggest killers to my open source contributions are general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul bleeding away.
    - notsuoh 6y ago
      That's wonderful! You sound like a very driven person to be able to do all of that. Of course, your experience and ability shouldn't be considered the norm with everyone or expected of anyone, especially because with finite time in the day and differing situations, we must strive to judge everyone on the same plane.
      - 6y ago
- deergomoo 6y ago
  We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project. Maybe we're just really bad at interviews? It probably doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-technical. There's usually a developer or two sitting in on the interview to try and balance it out, but I don't think any of us would consider ourselves particularly good at interviewing people.
  - notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    >For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations These are mutually exclusive things. Candidates who have more free time to code are more likely to be better at it than those who don't (all else equal). Candidates who have OSS maintenance / leadership experience are more likely to work well in teams (all else equal). If you choose not to weight those things, to balance the playing field for people who have more obligations outside of work, then you'll also have lesser quality candidates (again, generally). So if you're struggling to hire good candidates, maybe it's a good idea to weight these things (and bias against people with less free time outside work). Once you have good candidates, and this is no longer a pressure on your business, then it might be a good time to try and balance the playing field for new hires. But you cannot balance the playing field and also hire the best candidates. The best candidates will have unfair advantages in general. You can either lean towards having the best or lean towards balancing the playing field.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      We should try to eliminate irrelevant biases in the hiring process but we are fundamentally trying to select people to hire who will join our company and write good code. That quality is not evenly distributed in the population. Some of the gymnastics thinking that I see seems to suggest that we’d seek to hire fluent English speakers by interviewing evenly across all populations. By all means, I’d be more than happy to hire someone fluent in English from China, but if I’m looking for a fluent English speaker, I shouldn’t spent 18.5% of my recruiting efforts/budget in China out of "fairness".
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I prefer to look at everything the candidate has to offer. Don’t penalize people for not having OSS contributions, of course, but it doesn’t make sense to ignore them. Whatever credentials the candidate brings to the table should be taken into consideration. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to colleges or get a first job at a well-known company. If someone chooses to prove themselves via OSS contributions, let them.
- pydry 6y ago
  >I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. It's a fairly clear signal of skill quality and attitude. Reading open source commits/PRs and issue trackers tells you quite a lot about a developer which you can't see without some sort of a test (often not even then). >it's biased against people who don't have the time Surely any career that requires a high level of skill and practice honing that skill is biased against people who don't have the time? What's special about open source?
  - bauerd 6y ago
    It's not about merit but about bias
    - californical 6y ago
      You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it. Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow. Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks, you’re there anyways. But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that working on projects outside of work would definitely help you improve faster!
      - notsuoh 6y ago
        I trust that all that practice would make someone interview really well, no need to look at how much practice they've had as a metric.
      - watwut 6y ago
        > You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense. To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on correct selection of exercises. At that point reading some theory will have much bigger impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even exercising will likely make you improve more due to what it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.
- WalterSear 6y ago
  > for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. This is just another single dimension hiring credential, that will result in limiting your hiring pool to people like yourself. My code ran on 70+ million machines last month, but I've come to decline any timed or proctored technical interviews. It's not that I'm too good for whiteboarding or timed tests, or that my options are so open that there isn't significant cost in doing so - quite the opposite: I'm come to find the process so traumatic that going through with it isn't worth it for anyone involved: those jobs just aren't open to people like me.
  - notsuoh 6y ago
    We look at CV and then have an interview process. We don't do proctored timed interview coding questions in the usual sense, though we may walk through code. I understand the reluctance of a senior engineer such as yourself to go though any interview process, but to be honest I've interviewed plenty of engineers with decades of experience and many have completely fallen flat. Interviews aren't just about technical knowledge, but also to make sure people will get along and are reasonable to work with. I think we'll agree that there has to be _some_ interview process. iirc node's Left Pad package is downloaded like 20M/mo.
    - WalterSear 6y ago
      Yes, that's very different, and much more reasonable than most places that don't do take home technical examinations. There's obviously a fundamental necessity to evaluate a candidate's technical skills directly, rather than relying on credentials - my issue is with the false expedience and conflationism of timed and artificially performative technical evaluations, and my personal difficulties with the social requirements inherent to them.
  - iguanayou 6y ago
    Agree
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who may be working full time or more. Or their company ships a product that has a huge dependency on that particular OSS project, so they are doing the work on company time.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  How do you interview people who are changing industries then? The only way a cook or a librarian can get out of that and into software could very well be side projects and open source contributions. With your heuristics, you'd only consider their cooking experience and say "well that's not software" and pass.
  - notsuoh 6y ago
    Specifically I don't hire entry level people, so that hasn't been an issue. But if I did, I would likely look at projects and such, general aptitude, etc. because that's all there is.
- keb_ 6y ago
  This is bad for applicants who may be at dead-end jobs that don't provide much meaningful development experience, so instead choose to self-learn and/or contribute to OSS to fill the void. Not saying your strategy is bad, just that you might miss some good candidates.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
I've seen a lot of candidates put their GitHub link in their CV. When I go to check it out its usually full of half completed Django tutorials.
- teekert 6y ago
  Oh no you actually looked at it??!
alkonaut 6y ago
> On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Do you mean it's rare to see someone hired, or rare to see someone in the hiring process? Because if it's the latter, that's exactly what I'd expect too. People with very significant and visible portfolios aren't sending their resumes because they don't have to.
MrPowers 6y ago
Companies should have different hiring processes for prolific open source code contributors and folks that don't do open source (presuming they want to hire both). There are plenty of amazing developers that don't to open source and are great employees. Other devs have extensive open source code. It doesn't make sense to give popular open source devs coding tests. Open their GitHub account, see their popular repos, see how they communicate on issues, etc. The most powerful teams I've worked on have a mix on OSS devs and folks that only do closed source work. Hiring both is the best from what I've seen.
watwut 6y ago
> One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. I like the dudes honesty. He would not be doing OSS while pretending he is working for you. He is also leaving himself time for other things. It seems to me like fair way of doing things. Company like yours passes and maybe another one will take it.
ranit 6y ago
> ... it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Because these people rarely apply for a posted job opening.
danmur 6y ago
My favourites are people who have some personal projects (finished or not) to show. They're usually more interesting and telling than open source contributions, though I definitely respect that.

notsuoh 6y ago

Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who may be working full time or more. I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. Maybe it indicates drive to contribute to OSS, maybe technical ability, maybe no hobbies or commitments outside their day job. In our experience it's often the latter, but even so, it's biased against people who don't have the time to contribute even if they desired to do so. So we typically just stick with the resume for actual experience and college coursework, if any, but not the college itself. Using these heuristics we've managed to build a pretty strong pipeline of people with all backgrounds of education or experience.

Uberphallus 6y ago
Thank you! When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place. First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process they gimme some "take home assignments" that are a literal week of unpaid work. I've heard of companies that pay for those assignments, but I've never stumbled upon one. I always drop out of that, thinking, "good luck with that particular choice of candidate sampling". I might not have been the best candidate, but most seniors I talk to are turned off by these things as well. Timed coding tests are fine, up to 2-3h, I can squeeze one of those in most weeks. But, and I'm not making it up, "implement this subset of the MQTT spec in your language of choice" as just a step in the hiring process? Hell nah.
- austincheney 6y ago
  So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the family. I balance open source against things like gardening and house maintenance but gardening and house maintenance only take so much time. The biggest killers to my open source contributions are general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul bleeding away.
  - notsuoh 6y ago
    That's wonderful! You sound like a very driven person to be able to do all of that. Of course, your experience and ability shouldn't be considered the norm with everyone or expected of anyone, especially because with finite time in the day and differing situations, we must strive to judge everyone on the same plane.
    - 6y ago
deergomoo 6y ago
We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project. Maybe we're just really bad at interviews? It probably doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-technical. There's usually a developer or two sitting in on the interview to try and balance it out, but I don't think any of us would consider ourselves particularly good at interviewing people.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  >For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations These are mutually exclusive things. Candidates who have more free time to code are more likely to be better at it than those who don't (all else equal). Candidates who have OSS maintenance / leadership experience are more likely to work well in teams (all else equal). If you choose not to weight those things, to balance the playing field for people who have more obligations outside of work, then you'll also have lesser quality candidates (again, generally). So if you're struggling to hire good candidates, maybe it's a good idea to weight these things (and bias against people with less free time outside work). Once you have good candidates, and this is no longer a pressure on your business, then it might be a good time to try and balance the playing field for new hires. But you cannot balance the playing field and also hire the best candidates. The best candidates will have unfair advantages in general. You can either lean towards having the best or lean towards balancing the playing field.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    We should try to eliminate irrelevant biases in the hiring process but we are fundamentally trying to select people to hire who will join our company and write good code. That quality is not evenly distributed in the population. Some of the gymnastics thinking that I see seems to suggest that we’d seek to hire fluent English speakers by interviewing evenly across all populations. By all means, I’d be more than happy to hire someone fluent in English from China, but if I’m looking for a fluent English speaker, I shouldn’t spent 18.5% of my recruiting efforts/budget in China out of "fairness".
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I prefer to look at everything the candidate has to offer. Don’t penalize people for not having OSS contributions, of course, but it doesn’t make sense to ignore them. Whatever credentials the candidate brings to the table should be taken into consideration. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to colleges or get a first job at a well-known company. If someone chooses to prove themselves via OSS contributions, let them.
pydry 6y ago
>I say "often" because OSS contributions can still be an indicator of something, but it's not really clear what. It's a fairly clear signal of skill quality and attitude. Reading open source commits/PRs and issue trackers tells you quite a lot about a developer which you can't see without some sort of a test (often not even then). >it's biased against people who don't have the time Surely any career that requires a high level of skill and practice honing that skill is biased against people who don't have the time? What's special about open source?
- bauerd 6y ago
  It's not about merit but about bias
  - californical 6y ago
    You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Surely someone who spends more time developing will be better at it. Now of course this doesn’t matter past a certain point — people could spend all their time working on something that doesn’t help them grow. Then once you have those 10,000 hours of actual growth, you are probably close to a Senior developer level. Which after 5 years in an office job working 40 hour weeks, you’re there anyways. But at the earlier levels of developers, it seems that working on projects outside of work would definitely help you improve faster!
    - notsuoh 6y ago
      I trust that all that practice would make someone interview really well, no need to look at how much practice they've had as a metric.
    - watwut 6y ago
      > You generally become better with more practice though, right? Whole 10,000 hours thing? Except that 10000 hours thing is non scientific nonsense. To improve, you have to practice right way. If you code for 8 hours at work, coding 2 further hours wont make you improve more. Similarly, if you want to improve in music or running, just playing songs or jogging means you will hit plateau pretty fast. After that, you have to train on correct selection of exercises. At that point reading some theory will have much bigger impact, because yoi are doing something new. And even exercising will likely make you improve more due to what it does to body then further 2 hours of the same.
WalterSear 6y ago
> for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. This is just another single dimension hiring credential, that will result in limiting your hiring pool to people like yourself. My code ran on 70+ million machines last month, but I've come to decline any timed or proctored technical interviews. It's not that I'm too good for whiteboarding or timed tests, or that my options are so open that there isn't significant cost in doing so - quite the opposite: I'm come to find the process so traumatic that going through with it isn't worth it for anyone involved: those jobs just aren't open to people like me.
- notsuoh 6y ago
  We look at CV and then have an interview process. We don't do proctored timed interview coding questions in the usual sense, though we may walk through code. I understand the reluctance of a senior engineer such as yourself to go though any interview process, but to be honest I've interviewed plenty of engineers with decades of experience and many have completely fallen flat. Interviews aren't just about technical knowledge, but also to make sure people will get along and are reasonable to work with. I think we'll agree that there has to be _some_ interview process. iirc node's Left Pad package is downloaded like 20M/mo.
  - WalterSear 6y ago
    Yes, that's very different, and much more reasonable than most places that don't do take home technical examinations. There's obviously a fundamental necessity to evaluate a candidate's technical skills directly, rather than relying on credentials - my issue is with the false expedience and conflationism of timed and artificially performative technical evaluations, and my personal difficulties with the social requirements inherent to them.
- iguanayou 6y ago
  Agree
908B64B197 6y ago
> we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who may be working full time or more. Or their company ships a product that has a huge dependency on that particular OSS project, so they are doing the work on company time.
polishdude20 6y ago
How do you interview people who are changing industries then? The only way a cook or a librarian can get out of that and into software could very well be side projects and open source contributions. With your heuristics, you'd only consider their cooking experience and say "well that's not software" and pass.
- notsuoh 6y ago
  Specifically I don't hire entry level people, so that hasn't been an issue. But if I did, I would likely look at projects and such, general aptitude, etc. because that's all there is.
keb_ 6y ago
This is bad for applicants who may be at dead-end jobs that don't provide much meaningful development experience, so instead choose to self-learn and/or contribute to OSS to fill the void. Not saying your strategy is bad, just that you might miss some good candidates.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

I've seen a lot of candidates put their GitHub link in their CV. When I go to check it out its usually full of half completed Django tutorials.

teekert 6y ago
Oh no you actually looked at it??!

alkonaut 6y ago

> On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Do you mean it's rare to see someone hired, or rare to see someone in the hiring process? Because if it's the latter, that's exactly what I'd expect too. People with very significant and visible portfolios aren't sending their resumes because they don't have to.

MrPowers 6y ago

Companies should have different hiring processes for prolific open source code contributors and folks that don't do open source (presuming they want to hire both). There are plenty of amazing developers that don't to open source and are great employees. Other devs have extensive open source code. It doesn't make sense to give popular open source devs coding tests. Open their GitHub account, see their popular repos, see how they communicate on issues, etc. The most powerful teams I've worked on have a mix on OSS devs and folks that only do closed source work. Hiring both is the best from what I've seen.

watwut 6y ago

> One candidate wanted their contract to state that they could spend half of their paid time working on their OSS project. We passed. I like the dudes honesty. He would not be doing OSS while pretending he is working for you. He is also leaving himself time for other things. It seems to me like fair way of doing things. Company like yours passes and maybe another one will take it.

ranit 6y ago

> ... it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions Because these people rarely apply for a posted job opening.

danmur 6y ago

My favourites are people who have some personal projects (finished or not) to show. They're usually more interesting and telling than open source contributions, though I definitely respect that.