Give candidates real work & pay them for their time.
https://blog.algora.io/post/2022-04-pay-when-hiring-part-2/
68 karma · joined March 2, 2018
What do you think?
Personally, with my co-founder Zaf we cannot presently afford a full-time engineer, but with bounties we are getting a lot of work done while sticking to our tight budget. It's a modular tool, you can do what you wish with it and award as much as you wish. So far, we have personally awarded $7,876.68 in bounties to our own contributors, and our bounty payouts will be higher as our budget permits.
Your analysis is not incorrect. Of course, people who contribute to open source (mostly without pay) may beg to differ, sometimes it's just fun to build stuff and help out.
We certainly also hope to see more, higher-paying bounties :)
- Ioannis
As for the work classification, it is actually 1099 contract work! Every year, Algora Public Benefit Corporation makes an information disclosure to the IRS about users’ earnings from the previous year, summing up the money they have received. Users who made money on Algora also receive these 1099 forms, which sum their bounty payouts and come in handy when filing for taxes.
- Ioannis
> what if someone else submits a solution for the ticket I'm in the middle of?
You're right, the bounty should display the number of people working on it and when they started. That should be a feature - thanks!
> What if my solution is valid, but not accepted?
Very valid point again. I'd say it depends on the specification. When we did it https://algora.io/algora/challenge/bounties/1 we specified that we will reward the best submissions and not all of them. And we did only reward 3/5 PRs. Another early user chose to award all submissions. As long as it's specified and clear, people can decide accordingly.
> Production work on an unfamiliar project warrants some discussion
The past few months a recent graduate has been contributing to Algora before starting her job at Snap this summer, and we never actually spoke! Of course, there's plenty of discussion in issue & PR comment threads. The same goes for most open source software contributors around the world. But I see where you're coming from! It might come down to sufficient documentation.