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IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone. Actually, if I see someone doing open source like it's a perf

by neilv 20d ago

IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone. Actually, if I see someone doing open source like it's a performative career checkbox, that will not be positive signal, and could easily be negative. I understand that people will do what they need to do to get a job, but that pragmatic career checkboxing itself isn't positive. I will have to look for positive signal elsewhere for that person. The problem is that our industry has gotten very bad at hiring, and now we have everyone playing all sorts of games with it -- rehearsing Leetcode interviews, bad faith open source contributions, feigning enthusiasm, spamming AI-tweaked resumes, outright cheating on interviews -- rather than focusing on doing good work, and being part of a team. If you're involved in hiring, and you care about effectiveness and culture, consider pushing back against the prevailing dysfunctional big-corporate-cattle-herding practices. Especially if your company has no excuse to be big-corporate dysfunctional, and can't afford to be.

lnsru 20d ago
Doing good work leads you nowhere. You need to be in the game of power. Be visible, know every 3 levels of managers by name. Otherwise you’re only number in payroll’s sheet. Modern tech companies are not different from world war 2 era factories imho. Account xyz@bigcompany pushing lines of code to endless repo. No face, no name. Boring. Boring reasonable and reliable. That’s not what hiring people are looking for. You must be a rockstar, conference speaker and leader of few open source projects now. Skills, experience and good work ethic is not enough.
- hyperadvanced 18d ago
  For all of this fear and loathing, I am just a regular guy with a regular tech job and there are dozens of people like me at work. They’re all there because they do good work.
expedited123 20d ago
The moment something becomes a clear signal for brilliance, it immediately stops being useful as it will be imitated. Reminds me of this xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2899:_Goodhart%27s_Law https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2899:_Goodhart%27...
ValentineC 18d ago
> IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone. After reading your comment, I had a thought that the key could be to separate random, drive-by open source contributions (which are easily gamed by pointing a bunch of AI agents at GitHub) from committing to maintain a small number of open source/community projects for the long term.
- neilv 18d ago
  Unfortunately, I think the appearance of long-term maintaining of an open source project would be just another gameable metric, especially with delegation to an AI slave, to make it almost zero cost. Helicopter parents and then young adults are already long-term gaming metrics, before they start high school, just to get into college, and it seems that the same kinds of thinking persist through first job and rest of career. Being seen as a long-term maintainer of an open source project is now trivial, compared to some of the other things people already do. Offhand, ideas: 1. Use criteria the metrics-gamers won't think of, and don't tell them what it is. (Why this might work: the metrics-gaming mindset might blind people to thinking outside that mindset. Why this might not work: you need someone not blinded to apply the criteria.) 2. Do things that are unattractive to the metrics-gamers, but attractive to people who aren't. (Though you might still get overwhelmed by near-zero-cost AI spamming applications anyway.) 3. Accept that too many current workers were brought up with metrics-gaming mindset, and the others are too hard to find in the noise, and select and align metrics-gamers in game-theoretic ways. (Extreme example: you pay minimum wage, and there are no promotions nor titles nor performance evaluation metrics not anything except success of the company, but everyone gets real equity that's worth zero unless the team together delivers and wins, in which case everyone gets equally wealthy. The trick would be convincing the dumber metrics-gamers that they can't just nod and game this, and if they don't play like a team member for the team to win, they will be voted off the island and get zero, and possibly left in a ditch.)

by neilv 20d ago

lnsru 20d ago

Doing good work leads you nowhere. You need to be in the game of power. Be visible, know every 3 levels of managers by name. Otherwise you’re only number in payroll’s sheet. Modern tech companies are not different from world war 2 era factories imho. Account xyz@bigcompany pushing lines of code to endless repo. No face, no name. Boring. Boring reasonable and reliable. That’s not what hiring people are looking for. You must be a rockstar, conference speaker and leader of few open source projects now. Skills, experience and good work ethic is not enough.

hyperadvanced 18d ago
For all of this fear and loathing, I am just a regular guy with a regular tech job and there are dozens of people like me at work. They’re all there because they do good work.

expedited123 20d ago

The moment something becomes a clear signal for brilliance, it immediately stops being useful as it will be imitated. Reminds me of this xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2899:_Goodhart%27s_Law https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2899:_Goodhart%27...

ValentineC 18d ago

> IMHO, the days when open source contributions are often positive signal for hiring are long gone. After reading your comment, I had a thought that the key could be to separate random, drive-by open source contributions (which are easily gamed by pointing a bunch of AI agents at GitHub) from committing to maintain a small number of open source/community projects for the long term.

neilv 18d ago
Unfortunately, I think the appearance of long-term maintaining of an open source project would be just another gameable metric, especially with delegation to an AI slave, to make it almost zero cost. Helicopter parents and then young adults are already long-term gaming metrics, before they start high school, just to get into college, and it seems that the same kinds of thinking persist through first job and rest of career. Being seen as a long-term maintainer of an open source project is now trivial, compared to some of the other things people already do. Offhand, ideas: 1. Use criteria the metrics-gamers won't think of, and don't tell them what it is. (Why this might work: the metrics-gaming mindset might blind people to thinking outside that mindset. Why this might not work: you need someone not blinded to apply the criteria.) 2. Do things that are unattractive to the metrics-gamers, but attractive to people who aren't. (Though you might still get overwhelmed by near-zero-cost AI spamming applications anyway.) 3. Accept that too many current workers were brought up with metrics-gaming mindset, and the others are too hard to find in the noise, and select and align metrics-gamers in game-theoretic ways. (Extreme example: you pay minimum wage, and there are no promotions nor titles nor performance evaluation metrics not anything except success of the company, but everyone gets real equity that's worth zero unless the team together delivers and wins, in which case everyone gets equally wealthy. The trick would be convincing the dumber metrics-gamers that they can't just nod and game this, and if they don't play like a team member for the team to win, they will be voted off the island and get zero, and possibly left in a ditch.)