jobs-discuss 2019-06-20 | Slack Archive

Josh Kaplan13:06:56

Hi Everyone, My name is Josh and I work for a company called WorksHub. We’re developing a product that’s currently in beta and we’re looking for feedback from companies looking to hire developers. Basically, we had the idea of leveraging Open Source Issues from your company GitHub to streamline the hiring process. You can create communities of vetted engineers and fast track their applications in the hiring process as well as getting real work on your Open Source code. I’m just wondering whether this sounds like something of interest and whether you could see it being part of your hiring process If you need any more information, feel free to check out this blog or drop me a DM! http://bit.ly/2x7IQaN

Josh Kaplan13:06:05

the issues we currently have posted are Clojure

Josh Kaplan13:06:12

so feedback on them would also be super useful

sveri17:06:30

I think the premise to remove barriers in the hiring process is good. But like many solutions I have seen so far your introduces another barrier. Or said differently, by choosing from a pool of programmers that contribute to OSS you exclude every other programmer that has a job / family or hobbies and lives a "normal" life (Dont want to judge, everybody can do what he wants). From my personal experience I would say you exclude a lot of senior developers, that mostly happen to have a family and therefore not much time to contribute to OSS.

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alexlynham08:06:41

yeah I was thinking of this, not good for diversity

seancorfield19:06:28

I agree that your "community of vetted engineers" is going to exclude a lot of great talent. Basing hiring on OSS contributions sounds extremely problematic to me @josh.kaplan

seancorfield19:06:34

It also sounds like another one of those "work for free" plans where you try to get real work done by many people, even if you hire (and pay) only a small fraction of them.

seancorfield19:06:24

As a hiring manager, the only thing I'm going to use candidates' OSS contributions for is as a negative marker to exclude them from consideration if their OSS looks poor. I definitely do not favor OSS contributing candidates over other candidates that don't/can't contribute to OSS for whatever reason. Many employers don't allow employees to contribute to OSS projects, even outside work hours (in addition to all the perfectly valid reasons people might have for not getting involved in OSS in the first place!).

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Josh Kaplan08:06:35

I think the thinking is more along on the lines of instead of doing theoretical exercises like whiteboard tests in an interview process, you do real work and get to learn about a company’s tech

Josh Kaplan08:06:01

it’s not about whether they generally have time to contribute to OSS projects, it’s more about using it as part of the hiring process

seancorfield15:06:25

So the hiring process could get dozens of candidates doing real work for free -- who don't get hired and don't get compensated. And you're still using OSS contribution as a gatekeeper. That's a double black mark in my book.

Josh Kaplan15:06:40

I think you’re being overly pessimistic here. No-one’s forcing devs to contribute to these OS issues. They’re projects that they find interesting and may have done anyway. But with the added bonus of them being tied to a specific company that may end up hiring them. It facilitates a dialogue between company and candidate that may not have previously occurred. No-one’s saying this will replace the traditional hiring method, it’s just another method that companies can use to vet. Devs that dont contribute to OSS will still be able to able to apply for jobs and dare I say it, they may still be able to get hired.

sveri16:06:31

I agree with @U04V70XH6 here. Either you are invested in a OSS project or not. Making github issues part of the hiring process will get you a lot of stuff done, especially if you are one of the big ones where a lot of people apply. Here in germany we have the so called "one-euro job" which is a job where unemployed people can earn 1 - 2€ / hour. It's not a real job in the law sense but a scheme to get people accustomed to work again where they work 15-30 hours per weak, but only stuff that no one else would be hired for like cleaning up parks, etc. As usual it's a nice idea, but misused to some extent. That said, there is a market or everything and if you believe in your product, all the best 🙂

seancorfield16:06:48

> Devs that dont contribute to OSS will still be able to able to apply for jobs and dare I say it, they may still be able to get hired. If GitHub work is part of the hiring process, a candidate who doesn't have a GH account and doesn't have SSH keys and hasn't worked in OSS before etc etc etc is going to have to jump through a lot of hoops just to get set up and you're expecting them to do real work for free and you're forcing them to put their interview "test" out there in public, exposed to everything that they may well have good reason to avoid -- and their current employer may discover it (and may forbid them working on OSS). This whole approach is all shades of "wrong" -- and part of the problem with Silicon Valley culture is that excluding these people isn't considered a problem (and you clearly don't understand why it might be a problem).

seancorfield17:06:21

I'm seeing now in your posts mentions that OSS contributors would get a small bounty in return for any work they did as part of the hiring process. That much, at least, is better: candidates are often not recompensed at all for the time/work they put into often long, complicated interview processes...

gklijs19:06:53

Sounds to me like it might be useful for big companies that are supposed to be great to work for, and have several open source projects which are used at large scale. Like Spotify or Netflix. But if little use to any other company.

seancorfield19:06:59

(and I would be very wary of those companies if they ended up using contribution to their OSS projects as a gatekeeper to hiring engineers!)

Piotr Roterski19:06:04

I like the idea mostly for the fact it incentives companies to keep codebases open and in good developer-friendly shape. Idealistically one could hope it creates some new viable open source model.

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Ivan23:06:12

I think we're mistaking something here. I agree that judging cannot be based on OSS contributions, because of the things said above. But, this is not what Josh is asking about. Josh did not say that he's going to look on peoples contributions. He said he'll have people look and pick up an open issue of those his company has listed. This is irrelevant to any other contributions of the candidates. So, the question is not about OSS contributions at all, the way I read it. The question goes back to what has been discussed multiple times before: having people dedicate time on these sort of tests. Why would people spend time on a test without any compensation? Are the results reliable? Would you favour how quick someone was, or if they solved the "hardest" issue? Does this process create bias from the company perspective? Does this process, when done openly, create competition between the candidates? If you allow the candidate to interact with other devs in the issue comments, as a way to see how well they communicate, and how they think things through, that would be interesting. But, again, it takes time. If it doesn't take time, then it is probably not something that can be reliable enough to base your judgement upon. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Ivan23:06:20

on second read, Josh wrote > leveraging Open Source Issues from *your* company GitHub sorry, I take it all back. ¯\(ツ)/¯

2019-06-20

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