Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Your future employer wants to hire you to do a job.
If that employer is an ISV, then she wants to use use you to turn code into money, as efficiently as possible. If the employer does something else, then he wants you to make it easier for other people to make money.
So, with that in mind, does it matter what you did in the past? No. "Past experience is no guarantee for future performance."
So what, then? What matters is can you do the job the employer wants now, can you fit in with the rest of the team, and will you take the initiative to grow yourself? If you can answer the first two in the affirmative, you won't have a problem getting yourself a job*. If you can answer the last in the affirmative, you can keep yourself gainfully employed long term (in the field).
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*Not applicable if the interviewer is incompetent (i.e., asks questions from the Big Book Of Interview Questions).
Yeah, right.
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.)
What you should do is make a printout of all your Slashdot posts, and tack that on to the end of your resume. Employers are VERY impressed by heavy participation at Slashdot; it has been shown to equate to high productivity on the job.
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).