Many companies, including my own and the commercial open source companies mentioned in this post, consider open source contributions a major factor in hiring remote talent.
In your experience, is there usually a more or less deterministic path to a stage where the question of starting to get paid usually comes up? Who initiates it?
The result of this discussion may very well be that the company isn't interested in this kind of relationship for any number of good reasons. But what's important, I think, is for a contributor to be able to have the right expectations coming in. As in:
- Should I join on a purely for fun basis and see where it goes from there, keeping in mind things most likely will stay this way going forward.
- Or if everyone is happy with the quality of code, communication, etc across a number of pull requests, then it's definitely OK and expected to bring up the question of payment/employment.
Thank you.
Send a couple more high quality PRs and you can likely leverage that into a job.
There is no deterministic way to transition from unpaid to paid. It's just one signal among many that a recruiter or company looking for services would look into.