I think I might have said this before on another HN thread, but of course as an interviewer, I sometimes double-check the CVs and candidates to look for 'hidden qualities' such as open-source contributions. If one recruiter overlooks a candidate, I really ask them why and if the candidate DOES have significant and relevant patches, I actually bypass their decision and I bring them in onsite.
I find these technical programming tests useless for finding qualified candidates unless you are preparing for a programming olympiad or some other competitive programming competition. But open-source contributions allows me to find the patches you made on code reviewing tickets and see it in the open.
It would be better if more companies used open-source contributions as acceptable evidence of relevant experience these days.
I think that citing this example every time "hiring at Google/Big tech" is discussed on HN is useless.
We know that there are a lot of false negative and and lot of chance in the hiring process (so many things can fail in a process involving so many steps and people).
There are also legitimate rejections, like hm, bold statements ("90% of your engineers use my software"), fingerpointing or not being able to seek for assistance when you don't know something.
I discussed interviews with many people, and I'm convinced that solving the problem with the theoretically-optimal solution is not the only way to get a positive review. Being open about things I didn't know helped me: for instance "Hm, I'm not sure about how to do this exact thing, I'll use the function do_this_thing() and implement it later if I still have time, if that's OK for you" buys you time and allows to keep the discussion focused on the main problem.
I think both you and your parent are in violent agreement.
It's not as if many people who were in FAANG haven't admitted there are serious issues with the interview process. Even advocates of the process are open about it.
No one has found an interview process that lacks serious issues. Hiring people solely on the basis of major contributions to software has its own serious issues.
In both cases he bypassed the recruiter and leetcode stages which are common steps before the on-site interview at most companies.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...
I also submitted patches to various projects, including some quite impactful ones that the associated companies used and that e.g. increased performance significantly. Also have written a library that one of the companies (in the extended FANG circle) needed but didn't achieve it to write on their own for a lot more time.
I have never been asked about any of those things in a typical interview loop. I think this is due to a mixture of interviewers not knowing the technologies themselves (there are actually a very low amount of developers who know their foundational technologies in detail) and interview loops mostly standardized on CS basics (extended FizzBuzz).
If the main goal is to land a good job I wouldn't recommend people to try to get recognition with open source projects. Doing Leetcode exercises, having a good network and doing some job-hopping from time to time might help a lot more.
However I still think contributing to OSS projects can be awesome, and can provide a very satisfying feel to oneself.
Find any way you can to gain practical experience. Internships, consulting, open-source. Really anything. The bonus is that you'll gain confidence through this path as well. You'll know you're capable of doing the full job (not just the work).
Also, the contributions graphic (with the colored boxes) is often off-putting, because many people tend to also use GH for random weekend hacks, which are shown as "contributions" just as much as "oh I made Firefox 2x faster on BSD" kind of things are. To GitHub, a commit is just a commit, and "I ran create-react-app" and "Fixed impossible 10 year old race condition in Hadoop" are both shown as a green box.
Spell out your relevant OSS contributions in your CV and/or your email. Don't just link to your GitHub profile, GitHub profiles are shit.
To be honest, if you only link to your GH and then conclude that interviewers aren't interested in your open source work, then this gives me the idea that you're not that interested in your interviewers either. Help them out a bit!
The companies won't hunt on github.
I don't think it does all that much difference even if they know about said contributions.
What a great time to be alive.
I would certainly hope not. It's one thing to fast-track from an internship or a coding camp, but any company that would be willing to do that for an open-source contributor who's never been interacted with in a professional environment would have serious problems with its hiring standards.
If it's already obvious that someone can code, then parts like leetcode look like either dimwitted corporate inflexibility, or a transparent hazing power play.
It seems like the majority of people in supposedly innovative dotcoms have oddly lumbering-big-corporate-drone ideas about this right now.
Someone thinks they shouldn't have do to a distracting battery of whiteboard leetcode hazing, when obviously they can code, and they're happy to have real technical discussions-- and we're turned off by their prima donna arrogance. Their failure to comply with every unreasonable or abusive corporate demand is a showstopper. (That sounds like the kind of person who might object if they find out our entire business model is secretly spying on people and controlling them!)
If the applicant further suggested that they also would like some basis for evaluating their prospective team members (just normally; not whiteboard hazing them), we'd totally flip out, and for years later would be mocking the arrogance of that one uppity jerk, who don't appreciate how our revered VC fore-funders commanded us, over 10 years ago, how software development culture works.
1) Assuming it would be OP's first job.
2) Requiring previous professional interaction before even a job interview.
Both seems weird to me and I'm grateful my first company didn't have those requirements for hiring.
Navigating a big codebase and adding/fixing things seems like a good skill to have demonstrated.
Many open source projects are far removed from the ideal of a disjoint group hackers making something nice in their own time. Contributors to Firefox, Chromium, Linux, etc. are usually paid to do work to enable things that the company they work for want[1]. If your contributions are significant but don't further those goals, you may be unable to get them merged. In my opinion, don't devalue your own work when you could spend it on a project of your own, or a smaller project that's genuinely a community effort.
[1] Mozilla, Google (& many from Ubuntu), Intel
How does company interest in an open source hurt you? Why can't a corporation be part of the community? How is that in any way against an ideal?
You can fork Firefox if Mozilla rejects your patches.
Even small community hacker project maintainers can reject patches, and you can form of you don't like that.
IMO, don't devalue your work by refusing to work on a project with millions of users and preferring unpopular low impact projects.
edit: I'd love to be wrong here. Feel free to correct me instead of just downvoting.
I've had Google, Amazon, Stanford University and a host of other prestigious places reach out to me and go in good directions. On the other hand, I have never heard so much as a peep from Microsoft or Intel despite dozens of applications. I had friends that got into Microsoft right out of college and their programming ability wasn't above average nor were their social skills that much better. I have friends that I worked with that were at Intel and they complained that they could have done their job straight out of high school; conversely, most of my work up until recently required graduate level math.
My thought was since obviously I could do the job, then they would hire me without having to go through the usual interviewing steps.
Every time I have applied, I never got pass the recruiter. Never got a call to talk about my patches, just a generic rejection response.
Then I realized that I was spending too much effort on a single company, so I stopped contributing and applying. Seems leetcode grinding would be a higher reward for the effort.