[miguelmota]

> Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement / desirable for employment.

Well employers simply want to see your portfolio and coding abilities, and open public code is the easiest way to screen candidates. It's not the most ideal way of checking since there can be many good candidates that don't write OSS for fun but I suppose it's a trade off the employers are making. If you can demonstrate your coding abilities through blogging or other mediums other than OSS than that's a good way to show you know what you're talking about.

If you write OSS on the side then of course that's a bonus but definitely not a requirement. I tend to write OSS for fun but I don't feel obligated to fix issues if I don't have the time or resources unless they offer payment. Anyone can simply fork the projects and fix it themselves.

[Draiken]

I've seen many job adverts that specifically cited "seeing Github contributions" as a requirement.

I don't see how that is not enforcing free work.

You could say that you can choose to not apply to that company, but not everyone lives on SF and has tons of offers to choose from.

It becomes this unspoken rule that to work on many companies you have to contribute to OSS (preferably on Github). If you really need a job, you can't really pick and choose.

[dragonwriter]

> I've seen many job adverts that specifically cited "seeing Github contributions" as a requirement.

> I don't see how that is not enforcing free work.

Paid open source work, on GitHub-hosted projects, still produces viewable GitHub contributions. That requirements enforces open source work, it doesn't enforce free work. Like other professions where people are hired based on portfolios, having a portfolio requirement doesn't mandate free work, just work that is not restricted by the client in a way which prevents it's use in your portfolio.

Of course, if your paid work doesn't fit that model, you may need to do free work to build a portfolio.

[boring_twenties]

That requirement is even stupider considering many FOSS projects don't even use github. So a decade-plus OpenBSD developer would not be qualified, but a guy with a million useless and broken npm modules would be a shoe-in.