Blame the interviewers who require OSS contributions. Same with DigitalOcean and their "hacktobefest"¹, or whatever it's called. LKML is full of attempts at these. For some reason I remember a particular exchange (but it's quite typical) between Linus and some random 16 year old ESL student, who bugged Linus for days to accept his "typo fixes" (most of which weren't really typos), and Linus's replies in the manner of "lemme get right on that". From what I understand it's just something you have to deal with as a prominent OSS figure.

1: https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/01/Spamtoberfest.html

I am subscribed to the mailing list used to discuss development of the Django project. This is a very frequent occurrence. There is a constant stream of wannabe contributors that feel somehow inclined or compelled to ask the mailing list for a primer on contribution instead of reading the myriad disclaimers and existing documentation. It’s often obvious that they’re incredibly green behind the ears and barely know what Python or Django are, let alone how to use it. I personally find the combination of hubris and dishonesty jarring, though I appreciate that at the core of it is a cultural difference that I just don’t understand.

Bullshit. The number of jobs that require OSS contributions is minimal, and I've never seen that requirement for anything close to an entry-level job. This is people doing resume padding and making it worse for everyone: OSS contributors, interviewers and future candidates that don't engage in this spam.

And Hacktoberfest, before those incidents, was something for real OSS contributors. Not for spammers wanting a free T-shirt.

Blame the channels on Youtube that are teaching people to make inane contributions to game the system, the people spreading lies like "you need OSS contributions to get a job" and finally the people doing it. This is the reason we can't have nice things.

This kinda looks like an attempt to get a commit into a bigger open source repository. It'd look nice on a resume to say you "contributed to Unreal Engine on GitHub".

This.

As someone who works with a lot of junior devs in India, I know the competition for early career roles in tech is immense, and so folks look at "open source contribution" as a "brownie point" to add in your resume. Having a "contributed to Unreal Engine" sounds great on paper and 3/5 companies would just take it at face-value and move this guy's resume higher up the stack.

And we have enough seasoned devs who try to be helpful to these junior folks and point out that the easiest way to get started in OSS is to provide/fix documentation for OSS since it's usually low barrier to entry + usually lacking in most OSS repos (The people praising the rr documentation is a great anecdote). But looks like the "quality" bit is lost in translation somewhere.

A company really wouldn't at least ask what the contributions were? What kind of 'competitive market' is it where you can lie so easily and get away with it?

It is done to get through the "resume filter" cricle-jerk, because the sourcers and the recruiters are none the wiser.

When we hire people I usually check out the Person's github account and see for myself what the contributions were. For me it's more of a hint "these forked repos are worth a look". But that's because we are a small startup and everyone in the hiring pipeline knows how to use github. I can easily imagine that you can get some of the early filters in larger companies with meaningless OSS contributions because the people involved at that stage lack the knowledge or time to verify.

But that's so weird because even if that's on the resume, any interviewer would be interested in know what the contribution was. Maybe revealing that you only "fixed typos" would do more harm than good?

Depends on your level of honesty. Given that you're fixing typos to say that you contributed to a project, you'd probably double down and quote the number of PR (remember to only do 1 typo fix per PR) and then add a real bug you may have fixed or make one up.

Unfortunately the entire interview process is why I usually try to hire former co-workers.

That’s exactly the point. They want the interviewer to be interested so that they get an interview.

I got a commit into Django a few years ago. It was just updating a documentation link, but are you saying I should put it on my resume?

Ego loves pull requests.