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by jes5199 3781 days ago
I got my first real startup job by submitting a bunch of bugfix patches to their open source offering. It was relatively easy - they had a public bug tracker, and I just picked the things I thought I could figure out, and after one weekend, I had a job offer.

I was there for two years, and I never saw another candidate try to do that. We kept doing technical interviews that gave mixed signals - plenty of people got turned down because we didn't have an effective way of measuring their abilities. If they had gone through the code review process, they would have had a much better chance of getting the job. (In hindsight, I'm not sure why we didn't include "submit a bugfix to our open source project" as part of a standard interview process)

1 comments

"submit a bugfix to our open source project" might be looked down upon as trying to get people to work for you for free
So pay them?