Been working at Hasura for almost 3 years now, this was how I joined.
Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#42Indirectly. 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.
Isn't Red Hat almost entirely (if not entirely) open source?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#43Yup.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#44If you already work for them for free, why should they pay you?
Because then you'll have to do whatever is the priority that they think you should be doing, instead of doing whatever you previously wanted to do with it.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#45If you already work for them for free, why should they pay you?
Imagine you make $300 for every hour someone spends and you pay them $100. Crude, and you can disagree with the numbers, but this is the general idea when employing people. 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…
Pay another person to work 40 hours and now you make $9200 instead of $8000. By hiring them you are losing the work you would have gotten for free. As you said there is a limit for how many people are willing to work for free so you shouldn't get rid of the ones willing to work for free.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you make $300 for every hour someone spends and you pay them $100. Crude, and you can disagree with the numbers, but this is the general idea when employing people. 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…
You also get to align their projects within your codebase to the rest of your efforts and strategic vision by way of paying them.
You can just talk with them to figure out something high impact that they would like to work on.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#47If you already work for them for free, why should they pay you?
> If you already work for them for free, why should they pay you? Because they'd like you to do it full-time instead of only in your spare time?
But why not hire someone else to do it full time so you have full time + part time.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#48If you already work for them for free, why should they pay you?
This is an extremely shortsighted comment. 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.
All of these can be accomplished via social engineering instead of paying.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#49Yup. 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!
Can you share what OSS project?
No sorry. I'd rather keep it private.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also get to align their projects within your codebase to the rest of your efforts and strategic vision by way of paying them.
You can just talk with them to figure out something high impact that they would like to work on.
You can try. Let me know how that works out for you, especially when you need someone to fix a small niggling but uninteresting bug.