HACKER Q&A
📣 jerawaj740

Can "Pull Request to Get Hired" Replace Traditional Tech Hiring?


I’ve been thinking: what if hiring was as simple as submitting a pull request?

Instead of resumes and endless interviews, candidates could fork a company’s repo (or a prepared test repo), fix a bug or add a small feature, and get hired based on real contribution.

Has anyone tried this? What are the challenges, and would companies actually hire this way? Curious to hear thoughts from both founders and engineers

  👤 leakycap Accepted Answer ✓
You communicate a lot to potential hires about your company in the way you recruit. I would opt myself out of the hiring pool if I noticed a company had a practice like this.

"Do some free work for us and we'll think about if we want to pay you for more" is a dystopian way of hiring that expects the job market to provide a perfect fit with no investment by the company.

I would wage salary suffers somewhere that is focusing on this type of recruitment, because it's focusing on the non-growth side of the problem. Focus your energy where you can build yourself and others up to find success, especially in hiring.

👤 spooneybarger
I would never hire someone solely on the basis of a PR.
👤 TheAceOfHearts
I think comma.ai, George Hotz self-driving company is doing something like that. He has previously posted about hiring contributors. They way they do it is that they offer bounties [0] for fixing bugs or issues of different sizes. They also seem to have design challenges which offer paid rewards as well.

[0] comma.ai/bounties

👤 benoau
If the job was as simple as submitting pull requests, sure, but there's usually a lot more process and social-overhead that candidates need to fit in with too.
👤 cbracketdash
Also tinygrad does this https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad