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by anonymous41
3708 days ago
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Open source involvement is overrated. Yes, companies say they value it, but you can't listen to what they say; instead, you must look at what they actually do. Are candidates with copious open source contributions getting hired primarily because of those contributions, or at the very least being spared the indignity of the white board and trivia questions during interviews? In my experience, no. Interviewers generally don't care, or perhaps their process is too rigid to admit the deviation that caring would require. In fact, when pressed, many will even admit outright that they don't care, claiming (as I've seen here on HN) that they have no way of knowing for certain that you're the true author of your purported contributions or that your contributions alone can't really demonstrate how you write code (like a white board presumably can). The only reason they value open source contributions is that it amounts to free labor, and it demonstrates "passion"--a quality that they associate with susceptibility to exploitation. |
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If you contribute to open source, your name and work are out there. People can find out about you and see some of your work.
There are other ways than contributing to open source too. For example, I've got a number of offers because I run a local programming language meetup.
Basically anything that puts your name out there will help get offers. If nobody knows you exist, they can't offer you jobs. That, I think, is where open source can help a lot.