Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
Self explanatory.
I'm just curious whether companies are open for this. Lately there is more traction towards open-source and whether a person can start contributing to it and later join the core team.
one personal example i've read is the developer of nomad levant project was acquihired[1] by hashicorp
[0] - https://github.com/hashicorp/levant [1] - https://twitter.com/jrasell/status/1230132251893125120
63 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI've declined, and a few years later they basically closed-sourced their platform (it's still source available, but only with years delay, and they no longer accept feature contributions). Can't say I regret my choice.
If they don't pay you they:
- Have no incentive to make you continue contributing,
- Have no decision power over what component you contribute to,
- Have no decision power over when or how often you contribute,
- Have no ground for asking that you follow any particular process (due to the first point),
- etc.
Because they'd like you to do it full-time instead of only in your spare time?
For large companies one of the obvious value-adds of OSS is it optimizes out the whole time-consuming, costly, and error-prone recruiting/hiring/training process. That all occurs voluntarily on the contributor's time who's so interested in the work they've already sought out the job, developed a rapport with the collaborators, and have been doing it for free.
You get 4 hours a week for free, you make $1200 - $0 = $1200
You get 40 hours a week for $4000, you make $12000 - $4000 = $8000
By hiring them, you make more profit.
You could try to get 10 people doing 4 hours a week for free, but maybe there is a limit to the number of people willing. Let alone the coordination and efficiency advantage of dedicating more time per week to tasks.
It's the same reason CIOs of large companies pay more to work with companies that provide a Service Level Agreement: their bosses (aka the board of directors) wants to know that there's someone smart who will pick up the phone if there's a real problem, 24/7. And someone to sue if things go south.
If someone is making excellent OSS contributions to libraries that you rely on, it is legitimately unsane to not try hard to hire them. It means that they won't be recruited by someone smarter, distracting them from further contributions. Also, if you bring these folks into your culture, it's almost always a huge win/win because they are already up to speed without training. They are already true believers, and you're rewarding their early belief in your vision by unblocking them so that they have their needs covered, allowing them to be even more productive.
You'd be hard pressed to find a more potent way to hire top talent. The idea that you are somehow getting ahead by not hiring someone who wants to be hired is probably the most expensive wrong idea you hold.
On the face of it, however, to me at least it reads like your 'question' is less interesting: a rhetorical restatement of "companies don't do this". Then the 'evidence' you offer is an invented just-so story. Like all such stories it reflects your response to the world and the domain of your imagination, but tells us nothing about the world itself. It's a plain empirical fact that companies either do this, or they don't, and you find out which is the case by examining reality, not by weaving tales.
Telling stories to assert that the world 'must' be as we perceive it is common but without worthwhile uses outside of debate halls.
I believe they joined deno shortly after.
So, I guess it does happen.
https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/9722#pullrequestreview...
SourceHut doesn't often hire full-time but we do often find ways to get funding for people on a part-time basis, and 100% of the time we already knew who those people were going to be because of their work in the community. It just makes sense.
One word of caution - sometimes we get a contribution from people right ahead of applying for a job. The best applicants are ones who are existing users and who really are interested in the product, versus those who are doing a pull request to stand out. The latter is still a positive, but the former (depending on the quality of PRs!) is the home run!
A key factor would be that we as a company support and maintain an open source framework. I'm not sure how well it would work without that.
Contribute to LAION, Eleuther or any of the image/media generation open source notebooks and you'll get an interview pretty quick, hired dozens that way.
(And I perhaps wish I'd gone for it! Was poor timing as I'd only just started elsewhere at the time.)
Looking to develop my Rust skills I found a OSS project to contribute to. Learned a ton working on an issue. A few months later I found out the company was looking to hire so I applied on the basis of my contributions. There was no interview, the company just took me on straight away. I'm still there and loving it!
There are downsides though - if you're really into the open source project, and then get hired it starts to be less fun. It also means that if your hired to work in one specific area, you probably stop doing other things because you need to get your team goals done, and it feels silly to do other stuff, which can be kind of sad if previously you were doing a variety of stuff.
We talked and hit it off instantly. He's very passionate about the product and when he mentioned he is looking for work, I stepped up and hired him.
I'm so very happy about getting him onboard.
And I know a somebody else who used to contribute to the Linux kernel before they eventually ended up at RedHat.
I don't know if it's because of the contribution that they got hired, but it could have been a factor.
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Also there's that tangentially related story about Homebrew creator not getting a job at Google, so there's that. [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338