[badman_ting]

As noted, it's expensive. I've encountered potential employers who were lukewarm because I hadn't done enough work in open repos to impress them. That's understandable, it is rational to tend towards "no" instead of "yes" when evaluating developers. But to me it seems strange to do open source work just to be more attractive to employers. So I guess it really is an honest signal. I'm not going out of my way to do a bunch of stuff to impress you because I already have a good job, so you could be ignoring good candidates with this mindset. But like I mentioned, some people might be OK with that.

[Bahamut]

As someone who does contribute a bunch to open source, it does make me a bit wary - I've met some excellent developers who do very little open source development and who I have learned a lot from while working with them.

Personally, I contribute to open source because I want to see things fixed and generally want to move fast since that's how I operate. Sometimes this has meant figuring out fixes myself and opening up a pull request. I see this as a way of helping projects I like move forward since they can focus less on bugs and more on feature development.

[a3n]

> But to me it seems strange to do open source work just to be more attractive to employers.

Particularly if it's an employer that doesn't itself contribute to open source.