from Hacker News

Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?

by gowthamgts12 on 9/16/22, 6:09 AM with 62 comments

• by weavie on 9/16/22, 10:16 AM

  Yup.

  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!

• by james_impliu on 9/16/22, 8:48 AM

  At PostHog we've hired a bunch of people like this.

  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!

• by 2143 on 9/16/22, 11:29 AM

  I personally know a few at Mozilla who used to be regular contributors to Firefox.

  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.

  -----------------------

  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

• by emadm on 9/16/22, 9:16 AM

  That's pretty much how we hire at Stability AI.

  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.

• by bawolff on 9/16/22, 10:47 AM

  I contributed to mediawiki, prior to being hired by the Wikimedia foundation (this was a while ago, i dont work there any more, although i still do open source contribs sometimes). I definitely wasn't the only one who contributed before being hired.

  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.

• by ddevault on 9/16/22, 8:35 AM

  Commercialized FOSS projects with a pool of contributors have a talent pool to choose from when hiring that non-free projects can only dream of. How else can you hire someone who (1) is already familiar with your code, (2) already knows your team, and (3) has already been proven to be good at the role?

  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.

• by thor-stripe on 9/16/22, 1:04 PM

  I’ve contributed to the Supabase JavaScript client libraries and built some starter templates before joining the team https://twitter.com/thorwebdev/status/1569630009240993793

• by ignoramous on 9/16/22, 8:24 AM

  Back when I was monitoring deno's progress, I came across this PR by Aaron O'Mullan that improved deno's perf significantly: https://github.com/denoland/deno/commit/3d2e05dc7b6735fe0b81...

  I believe they joined deno shortly after.

  So, I guess it does happen.

• by axelthegerman on 9/16/22, 1:56 PM

  I think it depends a lot on the company. If their oss project doesn't get much love and someone is trying to force their way in, I don't think it will work out well.

  But Posthog for example have oss in their DNA and I was using their product, communicating with their excellent support and fixed a tiny bug in their Ruby SDK. A while later they reached out with a job opportunity. It didn't work out in the end but it was a fantastic experience!

• by rjrodger on 9/16/22, 8:51 AM

  Speaking from the company side, this is our main method of hiring! It works great.

  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.

• by francisofascii on 9/16/22, 12:22 PM

  I know a person who got a great paying job at a streaming service company, by working on a set of open source tools heavily used by company. He didn't have to do any sort of technical interview. Now he works on those open source tools full time remotely, and got about a 70% pay increase.

• by lukaseder on 9/17/22, 3:59 PM

  I made https://www.jooq.org. Then hired myself in the company I created to maintain jOOQ

• by dasil003 on 9/16/22, 1:00 PM

  Minor contributions I made to Rails in 2007 led to being recruited as the first tech lead and eventual CTO for a nascent startup. There was no premeditation here though, it was just serendipity. I've found most big breaks in my life this flavor. It's more about being open to opportunity so you can recognize it when it comes rather than trying too hard to orchestrate it.

• by burggraf on 9/16/22, 1:49 PM

  I wrote SupaScript[0] before joining Supabase.

  [0] - https://github.com/burggraf/SupaScript

• by perlgeek on 9/16/22, 7:57 AM

  I've gotten an offer from OTRS AG after contributing some to their core (back then Open Source) ticket system.

  I'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.

• by aceofspade on 9/20/22, 5:16 AM

  Contributed to the Supabase Python SDK[0] and postgrest-ex[1] before joining early Jan 2022

  [0]https://github.com/supabase-community/supabase-py [1]https://github.com/supabase-community/postgrest-ex/commits/m...

• by ognarb on 9/16/22, 12:17 PM

  Most of the developer at my company (Nextcloud) are former contributors to Nextcloud or other open source projects. So definitely yes.

• by adrianthedev on 9/16/22, 11:17 AM

  I hired my first contractor through his contributions on our product.

  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.

• by ilc on 9/16/22, 2:46 PM

  Indirectly.

  I worked on a project not owned by a single company. But Red Hat hired me to work on it after, I worked on it at another company. :)

  Alas, since I haven't found a good OSS gig. But that's life.

• by silentworks on 9/20/22, 8:34 AM

  I made contributions to Supabase before joining the company, although my contributions weren't to any of their GitHub codebases but more of a community one where I answered questions on their GitHub discussion board on a regular basis for users who were less experienced with the platform than I was.

• by cestith on 9/16/22, 1:17 PM

  A few former coworkers of mine were improving OSS code for their employer as user/contributors then recruited to the maintaining companies to work on that code full time.

• by smortaz on 9/16/22, 11:40 AM

  definitely. i used to run the visual studio / vs code teams for python, R, nodejs, jupyter etc at microsoft. working closely with and hiring from the os community was both delightful and a priority for me. several key employees were hired that way.

• by OJFord on 9/16/22, 9:30 AM

  No to the title question, but yes this definitely happens - someone from Cloudflare emailed while I was contributing in quite early days of (that's not a brag - I mean it was relatively easy for me to make quite large/impactful/sweeping changes to) their Terraform provider.

  (And I perhaps wish I'd gone for it! Was poor timing as I'd only just started elsewhere at the time.)

• by gunnarmorling on 9/16/22, 7:04 PM

  Yes, it's how I got my job at Red Hat, after contributing in the Hibernate space for a while. Same for many other Hatters.

• by matheusmoreira on 9/17/22, 1:15 AM

  Companies have never offered me a job based on the projects I've contributed to but I haven't contributed to many projects to begin with. People have reached out to me because they saw my own projects on GitHub though. I wasn't able to accept a position at the time but it was really nice to be recognized.

• by justincormack on 9/16/22, 8:21 AM

  We have hired quite a few people on this basis at Docker. Always on the lookout for more.

• by firstSpeaker on 9/16/22, 7:53 AM

  Long long long time ago I joined Sun after contributing to GlassFish and NetBeans for a while (documents, test cases, some new plugins for NetBeans). They approached me and hired me to work on GlassFish application server.

• by SlickStef11 on 9/16/22, 3:47 PM

  Yup.

  At WunderGraph, This is exactly how we found one of our technical co-founders and how we actually got our first hires.

  We're huge advocates for Open Source and actively look at users who are contributing to our repo as potential hires.

• by gavinray on 9/16/22, 3:18 PM

  Been working at Hasura for almost 3 years now, this was how I joined.

• by wenbo on 9/20/22, 4:06 AM

  I contributed to Supabase Realtime [0] before being hired late January of 2021.

  [0] https://github.com/supabase/realtime/commits?after=9990120c6...

• by dshukertjr on 9/20/22, 5:20 AM

  I helped Supabase create and maintain their Flutter/Dart library before joining them mid April of 2022! https://github.com/supabase-community/supabase-flutter

• by anacrolix on 9/16/22, 12:21 PM

  I'm in the reverse situation, my anacrolix/torrent, DHT and other projects are used heavily and I work on and with them there.

• by philkuz on 9/16/22, 8:27 AM

  if the org has funding and you made a thoughtful contribution, I can’t imagine a better signal for knowing you’d be a good hire

• by markphip on 9/16/22, 11:56 AM

  Yeah, that is how I accelerated my career ... was back in 2006 though. Still think this is a great path to follow though.

• by boruto on 9/16/22, 8:33 PM

  Yup, got interviewed by person who reviewed my feature PR on their OSS. Easiest interview ever.

• by bitlax on 9/16/22, 1:31 PM

  My current and last company both did this. This is definitely a thing.

• by bowsamic on 9/16/22, 8:39 AM

  I think Andreas Kling (of Serenity OS fame) did this

• by charcircuit on 9/16/22, 8:09 AM

  If you already work for them for free, why should they pay you?