Inbound Hiring

I would not be worried about this style of hiring, it is much better than the traditional cold 'interview' with questions and answers because working at a startup is a two way street. Doing a project, internship or just contract work for a while before joining full-time gives the potential hiree a good sense of the startup he/she is joining. Its a small organization and therefore, its critical to make sure that you are joining the right team and its difficult to evaluate that just by a series of interviews where everything can be perceived as rosy.

I think it is a pretty interesting way to look at hiring. Gabriel has mad something that people want to contribute to and I'm sure none of them are volunteering their time with expectations of a job in the future, I would gather they just like his product that much.

I'm just guessing, but I would imagine Caine started helping not because he wanted a job, but rather he just had a passion to make DDG better. Thinking about it more, I don't know if you really would want to hire someone that was doing it just to get a job, as in that case their passion is to find a job.

Thanks! I had a good idea about the company from the get go, so wasn't really concerned. I was still in college when I started donating my time to DuckDuckGo and never dreamed of ever being fiscally reliant on it. I am very used to contributing to FOSS projects since it's how I learned to code which fit right into the DDG culture. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that even if DDG flipped in 6 months I wouldn't be in any worse shape since I was consulting while donating time to DDG. It's just great to work for something you believe in that challenges you everyday. Gabriel's concept of Inbound Hiring comes with an Hors d'œuvre of sink or swim culture. I think this is a good thing; especially where we are at now. Thanks again!

I would say that it's mostly based on the culture you cultivate for your brand and yourself. In Gabe's post he mentioned Initech, the company from the movie Office Space, because it represents the quintessentially shitty corporately inundated fortune 50 company. Consequently, when I think of FOSS programmers, their job is either to work on this FOSS project (hired by yahoo to work on freebsd), or they're unfulfilled by their current job and use FOSS as a way to be creative and enjoy their craft. Prolific people are driven by obsession (my opinion); so even if they use that to make ends meat, it's not the end of the line for their work.