|
I think a lot of people take open-source to mean "oh, I'll make a project that does something cool in my own time and throw it up on github and everyone can see the code." And sometimes this works. If you are (to take an extreme example) Linus Torvald and your open source project in Linux, then holy cow, I'm gonna hire you right away. But most people don't have the combination of talent, luck and perseverance that are required to get wide adoption of an open source project. So in 99% of cases, what you are left with is a library or small project that you threw up on a git-hub that maybe has a few stars and that almost no one uses. Furthermore, as a hiring decision maker, I really don't have much time to actually read your code. Got a project with 3 stars on github? That's great, but I'm really pretty busy writing new features and maintaining my code and I don't have time to read through your code unless I'm pretty certain I'm going to hire you, so I look for proxies. Number of stars is one of them. If 1000 people use your product, it probably says something about the quality of your code or the difficulty of the problem you solved, or at least your ability to solve a problem in a way that people find useful (yes, yes... I know it doesn't guarantee any of these are true, it's just a proxy, but in the initial stage of interviews, proxies are useful). The issue is that most people are never going to write a project from scratch that gets 1000 stars. However, if you have substantial work in a project that you didn't start, that's also a great proxy. This means that you collaborate with others and not only that, but the people you collaborate with think you are good enough that they are willing to merge in your code. That's a good proxy. |
As a filter for useful, sharable code, open-source is an almost total failure?