> Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common. Nope.

> Any company that requires candidates to have significant open source contributions is going to have a hard time hiring, because it’s not very common. Nope. Logical fallacy. FAANG needs to hire thousands. Startups I've been at need to hire maybe 1-3 people at a time. Best CEOs I've met spent a ton of time recruiting those 1-3. Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. If your hiring process is like FAANG, you're competing with $350k+ compensation packages. If you can find good developers who FAANG can't, and there are plenty, you'll have a much easier time. A hiring process which selects for 10% or even 1% is plenty fine for a startup. 1% of developers in the US nets you 3000 people. Best managers I've worked with hire through side channels which FAANG doesn't look at. If I'm a startup CEO/CTO/etc. I can afford to read code in your github. FAANG can't. Indeed, I can afford to browse github to find good people doing similar work, and work on getting them to join. I'm not going to post my favorite ways to hire, since they'll lose signal if more people adopt them, but: (1) they typically find on the order of a dozen people (and exclude far more than 1:10) (2) all the people they find tend to be good (3) I'll usually need to extended 3-4 job offers before someone takes one