It’s not exploitive if you like working on it. I can see an additional upside here (for tinygrad) that they better screen out people who are just trying to optimize for job prospects or money, who would do better elsewhere, and get people who actually like contributing.

Few people with no innate interest in the project are likely to ramp up and start contributing just for a shot at a job. Whereas if you’re Facebook or whoever you are much more likely to get people who don’t care about the product and just have decided they can make a lot of money by jumping through the right hoops.

All other interview processes (that I've witnessed or heard of) waste anyone's time with barely anything to show for though, regardless if it ever comes to a offer.

To me, it's better than spending months of your free time grinding leetcode to get past an interview (everyone wants to hire like FAANG now).

You get a small reward in return if the contribution is accepted and you get to contribute to the world corpus of knowledge.

As opposed to months of interview prep, followed by half a dozen interview stages, possibly including an unpaid take-home mini project, all of which could be for naught because you fluffed some obscure algorithm question that bears no relation to your day job?

What's even sadder is that because of AI coding agents it's possible the bounty system will go away. The value today is much less in writing the code and much more in defining the tasks and validating the code. We don't have the bandwidth to read tons of AI slop, which at first glance looks okay, but upon spending time to read it you realize it isn't good. The fix for this is probably a reputation or staking system.

I'm shocked that interviewing still works how it does in large companies; the Sybil attacks and DDOS are just getting started.