Ask HN: The Open Source Interview? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The Open Source Interview?

4 pointszaroth10 comments

The total spend on hiring is massive. A small part of that is the cost of interviewing, or more generally, selecting candidates.

Does any company out there test a new-hire candidate by offering to pay them a fixed amount to contribute to an open source project, and write about the contributions as they are done and when they complete them?

I haven't heard of this, but I would love to do it. I am thinking you would ask for 1 week of well paid work as an interview process. That's barely enough time to gain some traction, so in reality a dedicated candidate would spend much more time, effectively setting their own rate.

Then the company looks at what got done over the pay and the time. From that you calculate the salary and equity split.

The initial "interview" period, would often cover a longer period of time, based on both parties agreement.

What ground rules, if any, would you set? How much would you offer to pay?

It's fully tax deductible. It buys a lot of positive externality and even direct benefit in the form of evaluating a hire. This would be done near the final stage of the process.

As a percentage of the total time and costs it takes to make a major hire, an "interview" like this would be a minor component. But if adopted widely in practice it could be beautiful to watch.

The idea of paying someone to contribute a week of their time to an open source project is commendable, but a couple of issues spring to mind;

1. The problem with any "pay someone to do some test work" solution to hiring ignores the fact that most people already have a job. They will need to either take time off to do the test, which is effectively asking someone to give up vacation time to speculatively spend time working for a new job, or for them to do the test work outside of hours and be consequentially less effective in both the test and their existing job. Neither option is reasonable. There might also be contractual obligations with their current role that prohibit them working on paid outside development.

2. Having someone contributing to an open source project for a week and then vanishing means lots of open projects would get tiny bits of unmaintained code pushed to them making the maintainers lives harder. That's fine if it's a trivial big fix, but if you wanted to test someone's ability to add a feature to a project you're essentially asking the project maintainers to take on a feature that won't be supported afterwards. Again, that's not reasonable. This could be mitigated by giving the employee time to carry on supporting the feature once they're hired, or for an existing employee to maintain code that's added if the hire is rejected.

I like the idea, but really, why not just make it known that your company prefers to hire people with an existing profile in an open source project? That would encourage people to contribute in the long term rather than just popping in for a week.

I think looking for a new job should take some time. It's definitely going to take time out of the work day. That's a fact of capitalism, and it's unfair for the current company to feel cheated when employees take time to find a new place to work. That might have to occur during normal business hours, and ultimately paying for that is part and parcel of being "exempt". If they are hourly, certainly they would exclude that time.

It's a great point dumping a bit of un-maintained code. Better to dump a bit of un-maintained documentation perhaps, or close obvious bugs. I don't think there'll be much of it, but all significant code should have backwards compatibility and documentation. But more likely, the contributions are small things.

Very good points to consider carefully if doing this. I do think the information value is reasonable. It does take a time commitment to review what was done.

Changing jobs is a rare opportunity to take some time to work on something "else". Once you're in the new job it can just expand to take up every available moment.

Did you really just combine "fact of capitalism" and "it's unfair for the current company to feel cheated" in the same sentence?

Where in the facts of capitalism does it say that companies will be fair in how they treat their employees, and that time off to seek employment elsewhere is part of being fair?

In fact, I thought it was the other way around. When someone changes a job, they get a revaluation of what their job is worth. Often the job change comes with a salary increase and higher status in the new company. This serves to raise the price of a worker. By discouraging workers from leaving, a company can keep its wages lower because the workers are not as coupled to the market rate.

Hmm... I guess I did! I am thinking the market for workers required the reasonably free flow of workers between companies. Obviously there are issues with our labor market, but I don't think it's so bad that employers are able to actively prevent employees from spending even significant amounts of time job searching.

Of course I'm not saying employers should pay for the employee to search for a new job (although in practice that often happens to some extent). Just that they can't stop them, and shouldn't be able to retaliate against employees who spend time off the clock interviewing.

To your point, I couldn't find any particular CA or Fed statues that guarantee this. If CA doesn't offer it, then I guess it must be far-fetched on my part.

Taking the afternoon off for an interview, and taking a week off to write code that may or may not turn out into a job offer are two very different things.

http://24pullrequests.com/ is one of the such initiative though it's not directly related to hiring.

So this is great as a resource for discovering projects which are looking for this kind of temporary help. That's a great solution!

Found a relevant HBR article written by Matt Mullenweg Founder of Automattic (Wordpress); Hire By Auditions, not Resumes

https://hbr.org/2014/01/hire-by-auditions-not-resumes/

I really really like this idea. For those of us who don't understand taxes at all, can you elaborate how it would be tax deductible? Would the open-source project need to be a formally structured non-profit organization? Or would any open github repo qualify?

Almost any business expense which is "ordinary, necessary, and reasonable" counts as a deduction against business income. Hiring expenses are part of that, and paying for completion of a pre-hiring assessment would be considered ordinary, necessary, and reasonable.

Depending on how far you go with this 'assessment' you may cross into 1099 territory where it's taxable income to the candidate (versus expense reimbursement or per diem). It would still be a tax deduction for the business, but more hassle for the candidate at tax time.

I think if you took it past the point of a hiring evaluation, and for example, tried to make it into long term open source coding project, then they would probably be at least 1099 contractors and need be paying income tax on those dollars.

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