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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?"
It's a VisualBasic.NET world if you want to get paid.
You should consider getting involved in something other than game development. I'm not saying that game development is not intense and complicated code, but I think for most employers, it's just going to be a marginally interesting aside.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
In my experience, having a lot of OSS work on your resume looks very good to employers. Not only does it show that you have skill, but it shows that you are self-motivated and enjoy your field. You can also demonstrate leadership and management skills through OSS. The ability to see a project through from idea to useful product is a surprisingly rare skill, and open source is a great way to prove that you can do it.
:)
In other words, OSS is a good way for you to break the cache-22 of job hiring, in which you need experience to get a job and you need a job to get experience. OSS projects are much closer to real experience than anything you do in college.
In my case, after graduating with my BS, I spent two years or so developing this. I had no really significant work experience; just some informal unpaid stints with failed startups and a two-month research assistant job. In any case, I finished the above project about three months ago, applied for two jobs, got both of them, and now work at Google.
If you weren't actually involved in coding in your projects, that probably won't be as useful, though. Maybe you should get involved while you can.
(Obligatory: This post represents my personal opinions, not Google's, etc.)
I wrote some software which was moderately useful and semi-popular.
When it came to be time to look for a job I asked around locally. One guy recognised my name after having used the software at his home.
That was enough to land me an interview. Of course once I got that I was on my own.
I suspect this happens a fair bit, you won't get a job unless you wrote something insanely popular but it might help you get an interview.
(Although writing something yourself, even with other people to help, from scratch is much more useful in terms of being recognised than adding a ten line patch to the Linux kernel, samba, or Apache).
How could a post that has the phrase "free as in herpes" used to refer to open source be modded anything but troll?