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I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

grell.dev

81–90 of 419 posts

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#81

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster

Hey, props to your attitude, and I wish you the best of luck.

Obviously, you've provided value to a company in a really in-demand area. It doesn't feel right to treat the contributors like this. Sadly, it seems that the companies have the power and the intent to just abuse and exploit

I don't have a solution. I am just expressing my frustration from the perceived injustice.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#82
post #47

There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.

Weak managers and teams dont want to hire the person who actually delivers something that works.

The new person could show how unproductive they are.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#83

I'll say it: why would they pay him if he's already doing the work for free from their PoV? Oh, they ignored him. I am not sure if that puts the company in a better light.

Right now it is just a hobby and there are still a number of bugs remaining. Since I don't have an income from it, I can't dedicate more time to it. Hiring me would allow me to work on fixing them full time and make the progress much faster

Do you think they already have hired someone to work on it but are just not releasing the source code?

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#85
post #51

> Unfortunately they thanked me for my application but said the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications. It seems like they didn't even look at his application.

Yes, it sounds like a non-story to be honest.

It's a personal blog

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#87
Another reminder that if you write software under an MIT licence or similar then you're just working for companies like Anthropic for free.

Use GPL or AGPL. It's the best thing we have.

Remember that companies like Microsoft spend billions on PR and their goal is to make you think what's good for them is good for you. This is rarely the case.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#88
post #47

There is some dirty secret i learned in my time as a eng. manager: Working in open source / Being the maintainer of a popular library / Blogging about software: All this things won't give you necessarily a competitive edge but can work against you. It's counterintuitive but sometimes teams are looking for a more low-profile hire.

How so? Care to elaborate? I get that bloggers/educators can sometimes be not the best fit for IC roles but doing open source seems like a huge advantage.

IF you have a side gig it is easy to think you won’t be 100% invested in company success. If you monetize you most likely will jump ship.

There are other risks like burn out as you may read a lot of OSS contributors have — so when someone is hit by burn out it will be across the board not that they somehow will perform at their peak at job while burned out by coding on side.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#89
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homebrew is “just” a package manager, not the core of part of Google. They could rip it out overnight and won’t even notice it. And Google gave him a fair shot. This guy got rejected by some automated system without even interview.

So, was he rejected by an automated system or did he go thru seven interviews, as other commenters say?

You might have missed the subtle wording;

_That_ guy (Howell) got several rounds of interviews, _this_ guy (OP) got rejected by an automated system.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#90
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because - They can decide more easily what he works on - They know he loves this work and is very capable of doing it - They can own his output, a competitive advantage - He will likely cost them ~nothing anyway

While that sounds rational, I worry that the same reasoning is not applied in the HR department. But that might be just my frustration from experiences. To continue the devil's advocate: why bother with all of this, if the company doesn't have to and the OSS version is enough anyway?

This is an incredibly short-term thinking. The reason is simple: the author is not obliged to continue while this sort of thing can be demoralizing.

I don't know about the author's approach to this matter, but if I would find out that a company is making a killing using my software and then that company would refuse to even give me an interview I'd probably stop loving doing what I do. Sure, the software is under MIT license and it was the author's choice to do so, but what's the point of doing it under such a license when you can't even count of it mattering in a resume? What's the point of providing free labor to a company with revenue in billions? If you look at the author's blogpost, the only benefit the author mentions is making the number of downloads go up and that's just pathetic.

I am reminded of an another, similar case with a library called "FluentAssertions". This library used to be free to use by anyone until the author changed the license and started charging money for commercial use. The author did that because he spend several year maintaining the library on his own time and dime and megacorpos like Microsoft wouldn't even bother to donate despite using it extensively. What happened afterwards was that the author got shat on by everyone on the internet for daring to ask for money. In the company I work for his library has been replaced with an another free fork at a incredibly fast pace. All that free labor and the author got dropped as soon as they fell out of line.

The worst thing is that it wouldn't probably take much to make the author of the library happy. Even if they weren't interested in hiring him they could still acknowledge him, talk to him a bit to maintain good relations, throw him a nice donation as a thank you and now it would be a nice, good PR story instead of an another reminder that corporations are just looking to squeeze out value out of all of us.

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