Bounties as a Recruiting Tool

[tangjeff0]

A month or two ago we did a Bounty Experiment. This is a good time to retrospect on this experiment and think about how bounties should be used going forward.

Some unorganized points:

• Bounties should be primarily used as a recruiting tool and process, not as an actual approach to product development

• If product development and bounty aligns, that's great, but core product should be driven by employees and long-time contributors who have maximal context and calibrated expectations around outcomes and timelines

• We shouldn't overthink the amount of $ put on a bounty. More important than the value amount is clarity on the requirements and expectations.

• There only needs to be 2, maybe 3 value tiers that correspond roughly to low, medium, and high complexity ("complexity" seems to better than "difficulty"): e.g. $100, $500, $1000.

• Bounties are generally for two kinds of people:

  1. candidates who want to work at Athens full-time
  2. those learning Clojure

• Regardless of the experience and skill level of someone in group 1., they should probably start with the simplest bounties and then move on

• The more bounties completed, the more the contributor has worked with the Athens team, the better we all understand each others' communication and work styles.

• Just for example, let's say the candidate and the Athens team would know if it's a good fit after 3 low complexity bounties, 2 mediums, and 1 high.

  • 3 lows x 1 hrs/each = 3 hours ~> $300
  • 2 mediums x 5 hrs/each = 10 hours ~ $1000
  • 1 hard x 10 hrs = 10 hours ~ $1000
  • total = 3 + 10 +10 = 23 hours ~ $2300
  • $2300/23 hours comes out to $100/hour
  • Assuming a typical interview process for a startup at this stage is ~3 interviews, each ~1 hr long, this comes out to 20 more hours of work done for Athens more than an interview process. I'm not sure how to factor how much time would be spent in collaboration between candidate and the team, but I'll throw out ~3 hours, and just say that the nature of the collaboration would be much closer to reality.
  • $100/hour is a really good amount of money for a software consultant
  • "Hours of work" makes it seem straightforward, but this doesn't include the time spent by the contributor reading docs, setting up Athens locally, onboarding self into codebase, etc. Definitely doesn't apply to a beginner who learns Clojure for 1-4 weeks prior to contributing.
  • Most importantly, the input (time) should lead to outputs (Pull Requests of the candidates' code + time spent collaborating)
  • Even making it to ~23 hours of time going into 6 PRs and ~3 hours of collaboration async on Github and Discord would be a very strong sign that it's a good fit - my guess is most candidates wouldn't make it that far.
  • Assuming the candidate already has a job and can dedicate 7.5 hours per week to this, the full "interview process" should take 3 weeks.

• This doesn't seem to factor enough softer things like communicating with other people on Discord and GitHub, or going to community calls.

• Who ultimately makes the hiring decision? Right now still me, but there are many contributors who's opinions I weigh heavily.

• Even if technically capable, holistic fit with team still important - are skills complementary and is there chemistry.

• What about people who don't want to work at Athens full-time, but still want to do bounties?

• What about people paying out bounties in equity, not cash? Can't do right now, but one day if crypto infra improves.

• What about non-engineering bounties?