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Comment by still-learning | Hacker News Reader

>People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better

I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get.

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It’s hard to argue against hiring contributors, but a bounty system that pays pennies vs. market value for skilled developers shouldn’t be the only interview path, it’s borderline exploitative.

All other interview processes (that I've witnessed or heard of) waste anyone's time with barely anything to show for though, regardless if it ever comes to a offer.

To me, it's better than spending months of your free time grinding leetcode to get past an interview (everyone wants to hire like FAANG now).

You get a small reward in return if the contribution is accepted and you get to contribute to the world corpus of knowledge.

It’s not exploitive if you like working on it. I can see an additional upside here (for tinygrad) that they better screen out people who are just trying to optimize for job prospects or money, who would do better elsewhere, and get people who actually like contributing.

Few people with no innate interest in the project are likely to ramp up and start contributing just for a shot at a job. Whereas if you’re Facebook or whoever you are much more likely to get people who don’t care about the product and just have decided they can make a lot of money by jumping through the right hoops.

This idea that you're supposed to accept worse pay because you believe in the idea doesn't apply to George. If his companies succeed, he'll be rich. Of course, there's nothing wrong with even working for free if that's what you like, just don't make a moral principle out of it.

I don’t mean to imply it’s to get employees to accept lower pay. I mean that there is some implicit screening against people who are solely optimizing for high pay.

Lots of reasons why you would want to simultaneously pay well and not attract people who are optimizing for pay.

I don’t fully understand why you wouldn’t want to attract people who optimize pay. You always should aim for getting paid what you’re worth which is understandably hard to define. I think that’s the whole point of OPs argument how this is exploitive. You’re trying to sell a “vision” for lower pay.

As opposed to months of interview prep, followed by half a dozen interview stages, possibly including an unpaid take-home mini project, all of which could be for naught because you fluffed some obscure algorithm question that bears no relation to your day job?

There are also other bad interview processes, yes.

What's even sadder is that because of AI coding agents it's possible the bounty system will go away. The value today is much less in writing the code and much more in defining the tasks and validating the code. We don't have the bandwidth to read tons of AI slop, which at first glance looks okay, but upon spending time to read it you realize it isn't good. The fix for this is probably a reputation or staking system.

I'm shocked that interviewing still works how it does in large companies; the Sybil attacks and DDOS are just getting started.

I wonder what happened to George’s old policy of requiring everyone to move to San Diego?

That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task.

We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also).

I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote.

Why Hong Kong? I guess you have a bunch of contributors near there?

If I recall correctly, George recently relocated there.

Have you run into problems with contributors who can't enter the PRC?

Actually the opposite is the problem:

“International scientists rethink U.S. conference attendance“

https://www.science.org/content/article/international-scient...

This is not helpful.

It's not a helpful reply to that particular comment, but I think it's worth recognizing that the US is now in the same camp as HK or mainland China now where there will be some people who just simply cannot enter.

The mainland and Hong Kong still have significantly different visa policies. I'm not sure if it's changed at all since the handover, except for mainlanders entering HK.

Yes I know, but HK is still part of the PRC and there are people who cannot travel to the PRC.

It's not about (in)ability to obtain a visa.

An answer from the man himself. Thank you.

that's for comma.ai different company

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