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Comment by dirtybirdnj | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a cool idea worth exploring.

At a lot of jobs I've dealt with using contractors, there was an internal concern that people external "didn't care" enough. How do you plan on addressing this concern?

It's a system that will depend a lot on trust, and it may be difficult to build that with companies whos DNA does not lend them to trust outsiders AT ALL let alone let them come in and muck with production level code (letting juniors do it!)

I'm playing devils advocate, like I said I think your idea is cool and worth exploring. Not enough companies invest in juniors to grow them into their full potential, and I commend you for this effort. Good luck.

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> At a lot of jobs I've dealt with using contractors, there was an internal concern that people external "didn't care" enough. How do you plan on addressing this concern?

That’s correct. Either you are a full time employee, or you get second-class culture even if you are part of internal slack. It’s very hard to get external contractors to be excited when they dont get the swag / on-sites and share the culture.

Which is why we want to have devs belong first class citizens in the GitStart Community, and join all hands / game nights and learn from others. And our integrations push through PRs and all the updates to engineering teams.

> It’s very hard to get external contractors to be excited when they dont get the swag / on-sites and share the culture.

It’s not the lack of swag or on-sites. Companies usually outsource to cut costs, so there’s your problem. Also, I’m not convinced there’s correlation between being “excited” about a company and producing good quality results.

I agree with you that one does not have to be excited to ship production quality results.

I was previously referring to the 'external "didn't care" enough' which is generally true, and IMO not an inherently bad thing on its own

But I am not sure outsourcing to cut costs is happening as much now than a few years ago. The entire outsourcing tech market is shrinking, as most teams prefer to keep devs in-house than to outsource it away.

I'm surprised to hear that. In my recent experience in the NYC area, many places are cutting full time staff and augmenting with contractors.

I just moved to NYC so this sounds scary! How big of a trend would you say it is?

I gave up a high-end consultancy job because I felt like I had no ownership. But I know others at that job who love that they can help lots of different orgs. I think this mindset is just one you either have or don't have.

I think we can see to Hacktoberfest as a comparison to this "let external junior devs to deal with backlog" idea. And this project gives the same fear and worries of that "chase for the cheapest PR to get my reward"-logic as that which Hacktoberfest encourages.

While GitStart pays their developers, that alone could encourage better habits, I fear it could also enable this chasing reward mentality harder, setting the juniors up for failure, as well as frustrating the customer with having to deny and review multiple low-quailty PRs.

How is this avoided? This seems heavily at risk to cause more headache than help.

In the early days, we used to pay devs for every PR. That in-fact caused the issue you mentioned where devs would start chasing rewards. Now, devs are paid as a base either way, with light incentives if the PRs are merged with low review cycles and good ratings.

To prevent “Hacktoberfest” style PRs, we have a strong peer review system internally along with QA. Which is the reason why most of the above open source projects have found it a lot easier to merge GitStart PRs than the PRs by juniors posted directly

I do wonder though how we this problem can be solved for all junior devs contributing to OSS

> At a lot of jobs I've dealt with using contractors, there was an internal concern that people external "didn't care" enough. How do you plan on addressing this concern?

From my experience hiring, both full-time employees and contractors can not care; it felt more about the individual's character than their employment status.

Good point!

Also some cultures also show far less care than others (despite feeling the same way)

A lot of my Asian friends do not pro-actively jump into slack to not look stupid, but the moment you get on a pairing call with them the perception changes quickly as they are not as shy in a smaller group.

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