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> For big companies you need to drill LeetCode and system design. Perhaps for startups it is not the worst use of your time.

Exactly. Any hiring manager with a brain and not bound my clueless corporate processes would use OSS contributions are a decent signal for proficiency and social skills.

That means nothing in a big corp though. The hiring panel will never accept a candidate that fails the Leetc0d3 test because that means other panels could do the same and then it all falls apart for them. Status quo and all.




To be fair, it’s a hard optimization problem. If you are trying to remove bias from your hiring process then it is difficult to objectively score things like OSS contributions. (I do agree it’s something most bigcorps could do better.)

As a small company you don’t need to try to remove bias with objective metrics (indeed, “culture fit” and “thinks like me” can be good heuristics for building a small tight-knit and high-performing team) but when you hit the company size where you must introduce multiple layers of management, then fully trusting each line manager’s subjective judgements can lead to very disparate quality and other political/organizational issues.




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