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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>Others may and do have the same level of skill but didn't have the bandwidth to contribute

And even more have the potential to become excellent coders but didn't have the bandwidth to develop it.

It seems peculiar to single out one quality in particular that sends a clear signal that a skill has been honed on the basis that it took time to hone that skill.

All skills take time to develop.

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All skills to take time to develop, well said. I am confident that looking at how a candidate interviews will no doubt show the fruits of that time spent without weighting too much the time spent, regardless of whether that time spent comes from contributing to open source, from their full time job, or just studying and honing their skills efficiently under harsher time constraints. We don't want people to target the metric of "time spend coding on OSS projects" do we? I don't.

Besides, having a diverse experience base and pipeline (parents, non traditional developers, non traditional paths to SWE, and even single people with a ton of time and fortune to be able to do things like robust side projects) has served us particularly well in having a team with a wide breadth and depth of experience and viewpoints. Specifically weighting side projects in lieu of technical/EQ interview performance would ruin that in favor of the latter group.

>We don't want people to target the metric of "time spend coding on OSS projects" do we?

Nobody said that we did.

This is about ignoring OSS contributions vs. reading them taking them into account - i.e. deliberately ignoring a signal of quality because it might, for instance, discriminate against people who chose to have kids.

I find it particularly ironic coz part of the reason I wrote open source was to save time - to skip wasteful technical interviews that it ought to be obvious are unnecessary if I have public evidence I can code well.

We don't ignore them completely, we just weight them very, very low, as I've indicated. They do provide context. Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs, I suspect. We'll likely just agree that we weight things differently and are willing to forego some otherwisee excellent candidates to index more heavily on being fair to everyone in the process and judging them to the same standards. This is a conscious choice, and so far a very good one.

To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source. (Maybe if I had worked side by side with the person in a previous life would be weighted) Even if we did use that as a proxy, it doesn't really save time because people would have to inspect the work and still doesn't really tell me anything about the candidates approach to problem solving or framing of issues that I can get from pair programming or walking through some code for an hour.

I applaud all your open source contributions and appreciate them, but I wouldn't consider them in whether to hire you except perhaps at the margins. Others may disagree and that's their conscious choice or they're indexing on something different.

>Your phrasing "chose to have kids" betrays some of your underlying beliefs

I did suspect that underlying your opinion was a desire to discriminate in favor of parents/against non parents.

This would fit in with the double standard I highlighted in my first comment.

This was also because you mentioned "parents" in the context of diversity (which is weirdly unique). I threw that phrase out there to see if it triggered you.

>To your second point, I can't think of a single thing I would let be a proxy for technical skill in an interview process -- certainly not some commits to open source

I've not worked with a huge number of developers who have made > 3 significant pull requests to a serious OSS project but every single one has been stellar.

I've worked with a lot of developers who can do the cracking the coding interview dance who sucked and even more who interview well in other ways.

I don't discriminate in favor of or against any particular group and am not a parent myself, though I have parents. I do recognize that many parents are often particularly overworked and can't jump through the same hoops you have time to jump through, which is why the example came to mind. That's all, no offense or "triggering" (???) intended and apologies if it came across like I was trying to rile you up. Per HN guidelines, you should be taking the strongest form of any argument though, to be fair. Regardless, I think you've gotten your point across and I believe I understand your motivations.

We OSS contributors with kids are in the worst spot! :)

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