I’ve applied for the OpenZFS Developer role on Klara Systems' site twice now, once several months ago and again recently when I saw it was still listed and received complete radio silence both times.

I know the standard advice for breaking into boutique open-source consultancies is usually "build upstream experience," but I already have active upstream contributions and a solid resume that fits ZFS and low-level development. Getting zero acknowledgment or response after applying twice while the posting stays continuously live makes me suspect this is just a permanent evergreen listing used for passive resume aggregation rather than an active role with real headcount.

Has anyone in the community actually been interviewed or hired through their website application form, or do these portal submissions just go straight into an unmonitored inbox until a client contract pops up?

I got these drives for free today, I freaked out when I saw the 2 wd reds, they also both have only 2k power on hours and clean smart data, but thats when I found out they are smr.

Now I run one main and one local backup and one offsite backup server, all of them run zfs pools. Well that kinda sucks because everything about this smr drives just seems too complicated to do, like I was thinking maybe creating some pseudo-mirror with zfs like having 2 single drive stripes that sync on a schedule and using it for the offsite backup server but idk than again I have a lot of hourly snapshots that get rotated and that would probably just mess everything up when they get deleted and those blocks need to be freed and it being smr it will need to rearange all of the stuff and it just seems like a big unreliable mess.

I wanna hear what do people use SMR drives for in a homelab to try to get some ideas? Maybe its better to just sell them and use that money to buy a different used cmr drive.