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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

> A number of commercial open source repos already use us

Worth acknowledging that GitStart has, at least in the past, submitted PRs to open source projects unsolicited in an attempt to bolster their reputation.

We found their PRs to be of extremely rough quality - exactly what you would expect from junior offshore developers - and it took up a non-trivial amount of our time to deal with the contributions and get them into a state where they could be merged. We would also often find 10+ email addresses associated with a single one-line change commit, which I found quite odd.

While I/we encourage contributions from developers of all levels, it felt super iffy that we were investing in coaching the junior developers of the YC/VC-backed startup, only for them to use us for cred.

In the end I believe we blocked GitStart from our repo.

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I am really sorry you had a bad experience. As a bit of background, we started OSS contributions initially as a way for new devs who were ramping up to grow on open source repos. We learned a lot, and from feedback, we took that away and for the last few months OSS contributions are now on par quality as commercial ones.

I remember your case personally and reached out to you over email to apologize at that time last year. If there is anything else did wrong, please let us know

> We would also often find 10+ email addresses associated with a single one-line change commit, which I found quite odd.

To be charitable: could have been that the commit started off big and complex, getting modified and reviewed by several people over time... before one person finally figured out how to simplify it down to one line — and so then they rebase-squashed it down to just that line, rather than polluting your commit history with all the intervening nonsense.

I want to point that rought code is expected from junior developers in general, not only "offshore" devs.

It is sad that developers from global south usually have to perform at a much higher level than their peers at the north, just because unfounded prejudices.

The junior level is often magnified due to lack of English proficiency.

What does their English proficiency have to do with their level? You realize your reply validates OP's comment. You're being prejudice and assume that all juniors are non-native English speakers.

It’s hard to give someone critical feedback that is kind, effective, and respectful when using Google Translate.

"Global South" that's a new one :) There's quite a lot of countries in the Southern Hemisphere ...

That term goes back to the 90s

Its used in a bunch of Che Guevara's writings from the 60's

Of course not. It’s just been ages since I hired any “junior” developers from the west. I can also sort of expect them to have gotten a standard university education. I sort of feel that a lot of developers from the global south have been literally plucked off the street, given a 2 week intro to programming, and were then put on client projects.

I’ve seen great developers from basically everywhere, but the vast majority is garbage (at least at first).

What is your project?

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