Clojurians Log v2
jobs-discuss
@ivan.kanak_clojurians I think this is the correct way to read it, its’ not about what OSS they do as part of their general routine, it’s basically a way of giving candidates an excuse to interact with companies that might wanna hire them by doing real work (and getting paid for it) I agree with your point about it taking time and we’re not trying to create a Fiverr situation where it’s a race to the bottom. This is about experienced devs doing quality work that helps both them and the companies they might want to work for.
who is owning the repository where the issues to chose from will be listed? I am asking this because you wrote > Issues from *your* company GitHub If it is the candidate's own repository/project that means they will need to have an OSS project. If it is WorksHub's repository/project, you're back to my comment (they will be doing work for WorksHub, etc)
So it’s neither, we’re just asking as a platform for companies looking to hire
so say you’re, idk Netflix and you want to hire developers
you’d link your repository to our platform
and post issues
and candidates would work on it via our site
Let me pitch in as well: our main goal is to encourage candidates to work on open source issues of a company they are applying to. In this way you can simulate the interactions with the dev team of the company (a plus for both sides to get the feeling of how working together might be). The company gets something more useful than a toy application out of it, and the candidates gets a little monetary reward, regardless of whether the hiring proceeds. This also has the side effect of encouraging companies to open source more of their codebase, which is in itself a good thing.
On works-hub for now there are issues of our own open source projects as we intend to eat our own dog food and use it for the hiring process 🙂
I can say how I see it from worker perspective: I hate doing challenge tasks. They are fake without value and not real. It wouldn’t look like that to satisfy real business needs. I feel so frustrating doing this tasks, so I decided to not do it. I was trying but my motivation is always so low to make it high quality. IMO this is the worst idea for recruitment. It is good when candidate don’t have anything to show, but when it has don’t torment on people 😉 It is not the way how you want to get experienced people. https://www.works-hub.com/issues/?utm_source=Blog&utm_medium=Articles&utm_campaign=j.kaplan I am looking on this website and I don’t see difference. Tasks, which not guarantee you job and generally in 99% it is loosing of time. From worker perspective it is not attractive for me. Attractive for me is: talking about opinions, reading project code and telling what is happening there, showing my projects, articles, talking about issues and solutions, talking about downsides of our best tools etc.
But there’s clearly a difference here right? With a theoretical challenge or a whiteboard task, you’re not actually doing anything of value for anyone, It’s a waste of time for both parties because it doesn’t really tell companies what your strengths are and as you said, it feels frustrating for the candidates.
but if you’re contributing to their open source issues, you get the satisfaction of building something actually useful as well as a small bounty
no one’s ever gonna pay you to interview with them
but in this situation we’re saying
build something, get paid and if it works out there’s a chance you get hired
which I think is a better value proposition
I think working on real issues is definitely better than doing challenge-tasks/tests. Getting monetary reward is also good, to make people actually give time into that. Having the ability to actually interact with the team in issues, is also nice, to get a feeling on how it is going to be working together, or get a glimpse of the company's process. IMO this can work for juniors and mids; of course, solving an issue does not mean you get a job. There are more things than the issue and the code. As a senior dev I would prefer to talk about the concepts, the layout and the assumptions of the code, the requirements and the design, and understand whether we can communicate constructively, how the people involved in the project think, what the goals are and whether this is actually something that will work out for me.
Sure I completely get that, and tbh with you I don’t imagine many senior engineers will be involved in this process, I think that you’re correct in saying it’s a good way for Juniors and Mids to stand out. And ofc you’re right, solving an issue for a company doesn’t necessarily mean you get the job, it’s just a way to facilitate a link between candidate and company that could maybe lead to a job further down the road
so, this whole channel, what it comes to in every discussion I think, is that the non-technical aspects are more important when making a hiring decision; and in extend that most hiring processes completely miss this aspect.
this of course is making another assumption, which is that the candidate cares for the job (ie, they are not just going to slack around)
> you get the satisfaction of building something actually useful as well as a small bounty Sure, but this issues wouldn’t be serious. If they will be serious, then it would consume a lot of my time for free and change for a job is still really small. So considering satisfaction I prefer to do things which I really want to do for free and this things are not issues in somebody’s project.
> Sure I completely get that, and tbh with you I don’t imagine many senior engineers will be involved in this process Ok, then it could be a good idea. I remember how I was doing challenge tasks in the past. I was doing it to learn coding, syntax, tools, corner cases. It was interesting for me in the past.
So I think the point is: you have fun from it as long as you feel you are learning doing it.
But there is a time in experience when you don’t learn anything valuable doing this tasks, and then it became frustrating 😉
Sure I completely agree
Technical aspects are amplifiers, the people and the procedures are what they amplify
and the thinking is, when we’re a little further down the line, candidates can pick and choose the issues they want to work on, that seem interesting and that they’ll find fun
I’ve seen this done before where you get paid for knocking down an issue, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get hired
but worst case scenario you make market rate for a couple evenings’ work, and you have some spending money
but you’ve gotta pay me for that time
yeah there are gonna be bounties attached for sure
I think also it’s important to note that this is just one aspect of the hiring process, you’ll still have normal interviews if that’s what the company is into
it’s just providing people with some flexibility and using OSS to show a different aspect of a candidates skills
word
how do you guard against two people pulling the same bounty ticket off?
whose gets merged? who gets paid?
The number of contributors is visible on issue and it would be based on whoever does it first, we plan to push notifications also to GH Issue any time someone starts work on this and for bigger tasks we plan to add explicit approval process from company side, so we avoid above issue
Just as a final note, we’re looking for companies to trial this system, so if anyone in here works for a company that has open source projects and is interested in seeing how it works, you can drop me a DM and we can chat about it!