This sounds horrible. And I say this as someone who's been contributing to open source since.. like 15 years?
What does meaningful even mean? I sometimes spend hours and days trying to reproduce and triage a bug, not even talking about fixing it. How is any reasonably sized open source project different than a closed source inhouse code base (ok, usually the docs are better or exist at all) - do they really expect people to spend multiple working days on a job interview?
If you as an interviewee happen to find the proposed projects interesting or be contributing anyway, it's actually quite awesome, but even a big open source advocate this hiring method doesn't really seem practicable to me.
> do they really expect people to spend multiple working days on a job interview?
if you read the article they say their previous interviewing practice was homework that took about a week to do (described as "high effort") so it does seem they are looking for substantial contributions.
From the perspective of spending a week on an ad-hoc coding effort vs a week on an open source contribution I can definitely see the value, especially considering that it seems it's up to you what you do (you are submitting your "this is what I did" together with your application and not "I want to apply"/"fix these github issues") which also means you can decide the effort level and most important when you spend it.
Reading the article it seems nothing prevents you from working on this for 3-4 weekends and then applying, which seems completely reasonable and honestly not a bad way to go at it. It really seems a win-win-win: for the company, they get to evaluate you as a candidate, for you, you have a meaningful contribution for your resume even if the application doesn't work, and for the open source ecosystem as a whole, which gets some bugs fixed or features added
I mean, these days to interview you'd still spend several weekends refreshing algorithms and practicing so as long as this is the whole of the technical interview and not just the initial part plus a day of whiteboard algorithm quizzes it'd be a nice alternative.
I am less sure about the "cooking together" part of the hiring process, but if that's the culture they want to foster I guess that's their prerogative, on the other hand I do believe this should be stated up front and not be a surprise, given how not everybody would be willing or able to partecipate due to dietary restrictions and preferences.
Dietary restrictions and preferences 100% welcome! Grew up with a celiac sibling and one of our team members is vegetarian. Similarly to design, in food, restrictions lead to creativity! (Founder of the company)
thanks for chiming in and clarifying, best of luck with your hiring! as I was saying I definitely think it's a net positive for everybody to harness your interviewees' effort to improve open source packages that you care about as opposed to just wasting it on contrived exercises not benefiting anybody.
There's also the fact that if more companies adopt this approach candidates could technically do a single open source challenge to apply to multiple companies :)
The previous challenges were too time consuming. That's why we switched to this approach.
We intentionally left the prompt ambiguous in terms of what a meaningful contribution is. A meaningful contribution can be anything that the candidate justifies as meaningful. A single, really well thought out method contributed to a library that the candidate uses often can be all it takes.
When we assess the candidate we take into account the full package. Senior engineers with an extensive portfolio and multiple open source contributions aren't help to the same volume as someone who's fresh out of school with little experience.
For me it sounds awesome, what do you prefer: working on one real problem in an open source project or working on a fictional white board problem?
Think it lilke this: if you do a whiteboard interview, you have to solve the a problem each time you go to a new interview (loosing time in a problem nobody cares). But if you solve a problem in an open source project you can show it to every company you want to apply (and a lot of people will benefit from your contribution).
It's really hard to work out where you're based; I'm guessing New York from a tag on one of your medium posts. This is usually important to be able to discover when you're recruiting!
There's no way to get in touch with you that isn't "we'll contact you" with a mandatory phone number (which you're not getting).
I was initially interested in applying but now I'm not.
If you are about, could you let us know how well Open Source Interviewing has worked for you in the past? Or is this the first time you've done it?
On Datalogue's recruiting page (https://datalogue.github.io/recruiting/) there is a recruiting email address (recruiting [at] datalogue [dot] io) if you would like to get in contact directly.
The form with phone number field is just for demo sign-up.
My current employer requires clearance for open source contributions. They generally speaking approve all requests, but I'm not sure "it's required for an interview I'm doing" is going to be a compelling reason for them.
I don't know. On the one hand, I get that "work for free and maybe we'll hire you" is going to block quite a lot of otherwise qualified applicants.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of worse ideas around hiring. At least this will result in some positive impact on the world.
I'll also give them credit for requesting contributions to other companies Open Source products rather than just their own. There was one company who I had actually done some free Open Source work for in the past. When I contacted them about an open position, they essentially told me "that past work doesn't count and you need to do more free work on our newer platform we'll consider hiring you". That was a serious let down.
A week-long technical assessment? Cooking meals as part of the interview process? Jesus H. Christ. Now I've heard it all. We as a community have got to start pushing back on the increasingly obnoxious interviewing process for software development jobs. What other field do you know of that would put up with this sort of thing?
We cook because we enjoy it. Its the last part of the interview and meant as a meet and greet of the team, not as an assessment of your cooking skills. Knowing that you enjoy the people you work with, in my opinion, is better than going in dark your first day on the job.
In terms of other processes, I've got through much more laborious interview processes. In the consulting world we'd prep for hours and then go through several rounds of case interviews and getting to know partners. One of our team members is a lawyer with similar experiences. As a software engineer I like to showcase my work. Having the ability to give back to the community and the liberty to pick the project that I contribute to sounded pretty good to me when the team pitched this approach.
None of the examples they've cited at the bottom of that post are actual contributions to a popular open-source project, but seems more like stuff that's been built as a standalone project.
If you as an interviewee happen to find the proposed projects interesting or be contributing anyway, it's actually quite awesome, but even a big open source advocate this hiring method doesn't really seem practicable to me.