[onion2k]

Anecdotally, I look at the public repos of any company advertising a job I'm interested in before I apply, so open source certainly attracts some class of developers.

The problem is the assumption that people who do that are "better" in some way. I've known some brilliant engineers who don't care at all for open source code; they wrote great code that no one besides the customer would ever see or use. That doesn't make them bad engineers.

[arendtio]

> The problem is the assumption that people who do that are "better" in some way.

Well, your argument doesn't prove that the assumption is wrong.

In my experience, everybody starts with closed source code and before open sourcing anything the developers asks himself what kind of code he wants to show as his work which in itself triggers a desire for quality and makes them better(tm) developers. Therefore, I would assume too, that the mean open source developer is statistically a better developer than the mean closed source developer (everybody). But that doesn't mean that every open source developer is better than every closed source developer. It just means that when you are targeting open source developers you have a higher chance of finding a good developer.

[mariusmg]

>I've known some brilliant engineers who don't care at all for open source code

The obvious irony here is those "brilliant" engineers will use open source code even though they don't care for it.

[thecatspaw]

So? Just because your code is not open source does not mean you're not allowed to use it.

They might not care about the company they are applying to opensourcing their code. Plus you have to try really hard nowadays to not use any open source code at all

[jcbrand]

> Just because your code is not open source does not mean you're not allowed to use it.

Depends on the license of the OSS and wether you're distributing or hosting the code that relies on it.

[thecatspaw]

Sure, but you will allways need to consider licensing, wether you're closed source or open source

[onion2k]

If you go through your dev career thinking only people who write and use open source code are brilliant you'll miss out on the opportunity to learn from some of the industry's best developers. There are loads of people working on entirely closed source projects who are very, very good engineers.

Not every project is web.

[mariusmg]

>If you go through your dev career thinking only people who write and use open source code are brilliant

I didn't said that. I have just pointed that even close source developers are using open source when working daily on their closed source projects. So saying they don't care about something they use daily is ....wrong. Also I didn't said anything about their level of brilliance :)

>Not ever project is web.

The snark level, off the charts....

[SmellyGeekBoy]

> So saying they don't care about something they use daily is ....wrong.

A lot of people don't care about cars but will still own one to drive to work every day. It's just a tool.

[thecatspaw]

> So saying they don't care about something they use daily is ....wrong.

Its not. They just dont care if something is open source or not. Maybe they would happily use a free, closed source library instead.

[pjmlp]

Using open source in many enterprises is just a way to save costs, many times at expense of productivity as there are closed source options that are actually better, but not all companies are willing to shell out the cash.

Contributing back, or even announcing to the world that such packages are used is not even a thing.

[onion2k]

I didn't said that. I have just pointed that even close source developers are using open source when working daily on their closed source projects.

When I said "entirely closed source projects" I meant that literally - some projects have no open source elements. They're written in closed source languages that you have to pay for, with closed source libraries and frameworks that you also have to pay for. They tend to be things like control systems in small industries, unusual embedded systems, and so on.

The software industry is big and hard to make general statements about. "All developers will use open source code" is not true.

[C1sc0cat]

You must be rather sensatiVe if that's of the chart

[eeZah7Ux]

Not all open source is web crap. Not all open source is on GitHub, or has a website and is even indexed by search engines.

[pdimitar]

The recently announced https://sr.ht is a good example.

[scirocco]

Yeah, just like Sharepoint developers

[eeZah7Ux]

Where's the irony?

[emptyfile]

What's "ironic" about that?

[C1sc0cat]

I tend to read the company report and accounts if its a listed company don't think I have ever applied to an company that had any open source.