[madmax108]

This.

As someone who works with a lot of junior devs in India, I know the competition for early career roles in tech is immense, and so folks look at "open source contribution" as a "brownie point" to add in your resume. Having a "contributed to Unreal Engine" sounds great on paper and 3/5 companies would just take it at face-value and move this guy's resume higher up the stack.

And we have enough seasoned devs who try to be helpful to these junior folks and point out that the easiest way to get started in OSS is to provide/fix documentation for OSS since it's usually low barrier to entry + usually lacking in most OSS repos (The people praising the rr documentation is a great anecdote). But looks like the "quality" bit is lost in translation somewhere.

[bigDinosaur]

A company really wouldn't at least ask what the contributions were? What kind of 'competitive market' is it where you can lie so easily and get away with it?

[ignoramous]

It is done to get through the "resume filter" cricle-jerk, because the sourcers and the recruiters are none the wiser.

[wongarsu]

When we hire people I usually check out the Person's github account and see for myself what the contributions were. For me it's more of a hint "these forked repos are worth a look". But that's because we are a small startup and everyone in the hiring pipeline knows how to use github. I can easily imagine that you can get some of the early filters in larger companies with meaningless OSS contributions because the people involved at that stage lack the knowledge or time to verify.