I think Andreas Kling (of Serenity OS fame) did this
Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#12If 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?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#13At 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!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#14Speaking 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.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#15That'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.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#16Back 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.
Out of curiosity I went through that whole pr discussion and I guess a maintainer posted a performance comparison, but Im not sure what numbers I'm supposed to be comparing. Do you know?
https://github.com/denoland/deno/pull/9722#pullrequestreview...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#17No 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.)
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#18That'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.
Emad, what are next steps for Stability AI? I’m into the Data Science education space (exited my prev company in ‘19). If you’re looking into something edu-related, let’s connect.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#19Yup.
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!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?
#20If 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 a limit to the number of people willing. Let alone the coordination and efficiency advantage of dedicating more time per week to tasks.