Using F/OSS and Unpaid Experience to Find a Job?

andphi asks: "How has volunteer F/OSS experience helped or hindered Slashdot readers in finding paid programming jobs? I have been involved with a F/OSS game engine development project (Adonthell) for a few years now. I've become the primary story and plot developer for the project. I hardly even look at the code, though I do try to follow the traffic on the developer's list. I've learned C++, VB6, Perl, IA32 Assembler, and exposed myself to a great many other languages (JavaScript, HTML, XML, SQL, C, awk, sed, bash, etc.). But I wonder, what can I do to sell myself using my post-graduate project involvement?"

Comments

Somewhat, but not really

[trompete]

I've worked on some free/OSS projects which I've used in job interviews, but I also did three software development internships in college.

You'll find that for the most part FOSS experience will get you praise from Unix/Mac people, and will invoke a fairly neutral response from Windows people. Your average windows programming team lead doesn't know much about Open Source or might be bitter toward it due to the "free as in herpes" model of OSS licensing.

Mostly, employers of 20-somethings (I'm 24) are looking for the following, in order:

1. Proven experience from previous jobs/projects
2. A willingness to learn.
3. Diverse activity participation in college
4. high GPA (3.5+)

I have a couple questions to ask back:

Do you have job experience outside of your FOSS projects that would apply to a programming career?

Specifically, what kind of programming are you looking to do? Your list of languages is all over the place.

Brent

Re:Sorry, kiddo

[trompete]

Yeah, in addition to the parent: You're probably guaranteed to be doing something with a website, a database, and XML being exchanged and parsed. That sums up 80% of the new jobs out there. Learn Java and C#.