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by iliekcomputers 1196 days ago
GSoC basically changed my entire career. I'm glad that Google keeps this running, especially given that they got rid of other cool competitions like Codejam. Hopefully, they can continue finding the budget for these extremely valuable contributions to open-source.
2 comments

How did it impact you, if I may ask?
I was a student in a no-name college with no real chance of landing an internship at the big tech companies, given my cv had neither the prestige of a good college name nor many impressive projects.

GSoC basically allowed me to jump into an open-source project (no credentials needed), prove that I'm skilled enough to contribute and gain meaningful experience solving real world problems. This then snowballed into larger career opportunities later down the line.

do share some google employment stories, as these are aging well haha
Sigh. Lots, arguably most, of those laid off were tech-adjacent, not necessarily the core-engineering types that would have been doing GSoC.

Plus GSoC is for the youngbloods, the noobs, and getting their feet wet with real code and big orgs. It's a career starter, not a career bastion.

Very many of the 12,000 employees whose jobs were cut were "core-engineering types". I was one of them.
i'm not employed by google, nor have i ever been. GSoC is google paying people to work on open-source stuff, with little direct relation to their profits.