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

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.

This dumb question has an important answer: accountability and longevity.

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.

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.

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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

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

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