A FAANG Manager's Controversial Take on Open Source Contributions
Description
A screenshot of a tweet from the user 'medieval gabe' (@allgarbled) with a profile picture of a stylized owl. The tweet, set against a black background, has the text: 'my two cents: as a FAANG hiring manager, when i see a developer resume that has open source contributions, i put it in the discard pile. to me it's a red flag. how dedicated can you really be to your job if you have this much spare time to write code for free?'. The post is a satirical take on corporate hiring culture, specifically within large tech companies (FAANG). It humorously presents an absurdly toxic perspective where a developer's passion for coding, demonstrated through unpaid open-source work, is viewed as a lack of dedication to their job. This resonates with experienced developers who are familiar with the often-unrealistic expectations and debates around work-life balance, 'hustle culture,' and how personal projects are valued in the industry
Comments
19Comment deleted
That manager probably thinks a pull request is a new gym exercise and that 'free software' just means the company saves on licensing fees
Sure, why trust someone who fixes your favorite dependency upstream when you could hire the engineer whose GitHub history looks like a pristine, decade-old SourceSafe repo?
Plot twist: This hiring manager's entire tech stack runs on open source projects maintained by developers with 'too much spare time' - from Linux servers to React frontends, all while their proprietary codebase depends on npm packages written by people who clearly aren't dedicated enough to deserve a FAANG job
Ah yes, the classic FAANG hiring paradox: 'We want passionate developers who live and breathe code... but only during business hours and exclusively for us. If you contribute to the very open source libraries our entire infrastructure depends on, clearly you're not committed enough to help us build yet another A/B testing framework.' Nothing says 'we value innovation' quite like penalizing developers for doing exactly what made the tech industry successful in the first place
Calling OSS on a resume a red flag is Goodhart's-law recruiting: optimize for engineers with no public PR scars, then wonder why your on-call runbooks read like NDAs
Hiring managers love OSS contribs - on their own GitHub profiles, where it pads the resume without the red flag
Open source contributions are a red flag - because anyone who can navigate maintainers, CLAs, and semantic versioning will notice our trunk-based monolith still on SVN behind a VPN
And what's wrong with his position? God damm genius Comment deleted
The guys don't only write code for money - they spend their free time increasing skills to be even better! It's true dedication. Comment deleted
While I respect the self improvement grind, stop working for free. Go outside and develop other skills. Spend your free time doing non-work related things. Comment deleted
Usually when customers ask for a discount I tell them on one condition that I release some part of code as open source. Open source may not be profitable but will give you lots of connections Comment deleted
What if this is our Passion? Also will you suggest to learn on something others funding or plan to keep funding effective? Or in a more simplified example, is it better to learn letters in a four line book at KinderGarden, or better to write in Paid magazine to learn letters? I prefer the first one! 🫣 Comment deleted
I mean you do you man. Keep working for free if you want. I will keep working when I'm paid to and enjoying my time away from codebases when I'm not. Comment deleted
It's a sound work-life balance and likely comes with a decent salary. However, it lacks true dedication. This mindset confines you to repetitive, mundane tasks. It risks diminishing your enthusiasm, assuming it hasn't already, and could lead to stagnation, which in development equates to degradation. Comment deleted
I dedicate myself to living outside of the office. I come here to work and make money and then I go home and do what I actually enjoy. Your first sentence was correct. Good work life balance with good pay. Comment deleted
code enjoyer vs. free time enthusiast Comment deleted
better for us, tho Comment deleted
Lol, good luck, I'm being paid to write the open-source in my company 😅 Comment deleted
What are those colored badges under usernames? Comment deleted