> But impressive OSS has a history of commits, maybe even a community working with the applicant.
That's going to be a single-digit percentage of the entire developer community and an even smaller minority of developers who go looking for jobs.
> As a random example, do you really think it would be possible for someone to fake an account like this? https://github.com/pedronauck
No, but it would also take a lot longer than an hour for me to judge, from that Github account, whether that guy is a bozo.
> It's not 100% accurate, but having references and employment history is better than nothing.
Which is why they merit the dozen or so man-hours involved in an interview process.
> To be clear, I don't think OSS inspection is perfect as a hiring tool - it biases towards folks with the privilege to spend their free time working on passion projects - and I'd object to it being the sole determining factor.
There are even more flaws than that. Unless you only hire people who make a lot of OSS contributions, you need some other measurement. And it's fairer and more accurate to use the same measurement for everyone, so if you need some other measurement anyway, you should just use it.
Another issue is that OSS contributions are a good signal if and only if you are hiring people to do the same type of work. If you're investing in a specific open-source project and you want to hire the primary maintainer to maintain that project, fine. Otherwise, you have to rely on finding someone who has a rich OSS contribution history in the same basic stuff you're hiring them to do, which is really hard when e.g. most OSS is on the platform level and you're developing products, or if you want to hire generalists rather than specialists.
That's going to be a single-digit percentage of the entire developer community and an even smaller minority of developers who go looking for jobs.
> As a random example, do you really think it would be possible for someone to fake an account like this? https://github.com/pedronauck
No, but it would also take a lot longer than an hour for me to judge, from that Github account, whether that guy is a bozo.
> It's not 100% accurate, but having references and employment history is better than nothing.
Which is why they merit the dozen or so man-hours involved in an interview process.
> To be clear, I don't think OSS inspection is perfect as a hiring tool - it biases towards folks with the privilege to spend their free time working on passion projects - and I'd object to it being the sole determining factor.
There are even more flaws than that. Unless you only hire people who make a lot of OSS contributions, you need some other measurement. And it's fairer and more accurate to use the same measurement for everyone, so if you need some other measurement anyway, you should just use it.
Another issue is that OSS contributions are a good signal if and only if you are hiring people to do the same type of work. If you're investing in a specific open-source project and you want to hire the primary maintainer to maintain that project, fine. Otherwise, you have to rely on finding someone who has a rich OSS contribution history in the same basic stuff you're hiring them to do, which is really hard when e.g. most OSS is on the platform level and you're developing products, or if you want to hire generalists rather than specialists.