Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Helps New IT Grads Get Foot in the Door
Yes, some US IT jobs are disappearing, but Linux.com (which shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has a recent story emphasizing the job advantage that involvement in open source projects can give young programmers who aren't planning to ditch their dreams of making a living in the field. The article focuses on one programmer's experience with Google's Summer of Code, which led directly to her job working on the Drupal content-management system. But the underlying message (that involvement in open source projects provides a background of experience otherwise difficult to obtain because of the chicken-and-egg problem of "experience required" job opportunities) is generalizable to many other forms of open-source involvement. Do you have a job that you landed because of your unpaid open-source programming?
But how does it help non programmers and PHB who say they want job experience in a office not side / school work?
which shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot
God damn it, WE KNOW! :P
At least don't use the phrase "corporate overlord" anymore, please, if you have any mercy and decency!
Sounds like its not so much open source involvement, but generally ANY involvement with your field, helps. And thats true for any job, any field, anything. In IT, you could simply do unpaid internships and get similar results. Its just a bit easier to get involved in open source, because you can jump in a project just by writing patches and open they get accepted, and go from there...
But really, any field. Doing some volunteer work has always helped landing a job, its nothing new.
Details at 11!
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
I've been working on my open source project for three years and that doesn't help me a bit when looking for a job in Dublin (Ireland, not Ohio). Basically there's a very few jobs out there in which you can program in C or anything vaguely signal processing-related and they all want you to have at least three years of commercial experience, don't care if you've got the snazziest open source project out there.
And I've been looking for a job for over 5 months now, and mainly in tech support and system administration because really, no one wants to hire me for a coding job.
You just got troll'd!
I was working for my university as a student in the IT department and implementing an open-source portal. Ended up getting a job offer with a company that provided consulting for said project. Now that I'm four years into working with the project and on my second employer (voluntary change) having open-source project experience while in college and after opens a lot of doors. Beyond just the development experience if you become heavily involved in a project it can also speak volumes about your interpersonal and team skills.
I have created open source programs as teaching aids that I also use as code examples which I've provided to employers.
That was a prime factor in landing my current job, one I've held for ten years now.
The projects illustrated key elements of my resume beyond coding skills, such as project management.
I also developed an open source program that was invited for inclusion on DEC's demo CD for their Alpha line.
That was quite a while ago, of course, but I noted it on my resume and it has been a talking point that has impressed potential employers and was a factor in their considerations.
Do you have a job that you landed because of you unpaid open-source programming?
I lost my last job for using the dead compile times for working on my pet open source project. Then I found another job, so you can say I landed there because of my unpaid open-source programming. Does that count?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Being an employer, running a successful business (high end consultancy and SW development) for 8 years, I'd say that a really good track record of Open Source engagements beats university. Putting it another way, I never employ a newly graduated engineer unless s/he has an interesting collection of hacks in the home directory. Finally, I put great emphasis on any potential employee's reading behaviour. Anyone reading less than some 25 books a year is less likely to improve as fast as people who read a lot.
I never went to school for computer science. I went to college for Philosophy. I had always been around computers since I was six. I started programming basic on the TI-99a at 7. Granted it following step by step out of books, but still the knack and want was there. It wasn't until 1998 when I was introduced to open source and linux that my career path really shifted. Within 2 years of working with Linux and open source software I had become quite sick administrating linux and as a by product decent enough to be trained on solaris. At which point I was hired by a contractor for our local school district as a helper monkey for systems administration. Since 2000 I have made incredible leaps and bounds, improving my skill sets to include networking, virtualization, clustering, and so much more. All the experience I gained was by reading man pages, how-tos, wikis and using the software in a dev environment. Now I manage all IT at a 20 million dollar a year company.
I got some small-level consultancy stuff through volunteer open source programming but nothing serious. Employers value non-volunteer experience far more than just about anything else (unless they are deliberately aiming to pick up new graduates). The consultancy helps a little in terms of experience, but except for the payment, none of it was particularly useful.
bang goes my karma... again...
I got my degree in Physics, but my career path after that was in IT. My first job (January, 1995) was working as a UNIX systems administrator at a small geographics company. What helped me land the job despite having a different educational background was first-hand "experience" with Linux (SLS and Slackware.) I was the first at my university to try Linux (1993) so I became a sort of go-to guy for Linux questions when the CompSci students started to install it, and the university IT staff put it up on a few systems to try it out. "Something break? Happened to me too once, let me help you fix it."
When I graduated, and it was time to look for a job, a friend recommended me for the UNIX sysadmin job at her company. The fact that I'd had two years experience working with Linux, helping others to install it and get it working for them, really gave me a boost during the interview. I got the job.
Yes, this could have turned out the same if I'd just been helping at the computer labs (which I didn't, but others might have.) I think what gave me the extra edge was spending so much time with it at home, so when the technical interview questions came up, I was able to answer them very well. Nothing beats spending that extra time on your own desktop system, when you'll eventually mess something up and have to learn stuff on your own to get it working again and know how not break it a second time. That kind of "experience" says a lot to a hiring manager.
Here in Italy this kind of vision is not so radicated, but often works: I was engaged as software developer having on my curriculum only a reference to free software project I was (and I'm currently) working, http://lobotomy.sf.net , and all bosses I speech with was curious and asked me firstly about that instead other professional skills.
Since that experience, with my no-profit organization I'm running a web portal dedicated to young free software developers in my area (Piedmont, Italy) with the idea to expose future talents having no experiences but lots of enthusiasm and self collected knowledges: http://barberaware.org
First "real" tech job I interviewed for had a job description focused around porting and packaging software -- two things I'd already been doing for fun (building RPMs for whatever the current Red Hat was at the time, and porting software to my university's Solaris and IRIX boxes); the CTO (well, it was less than a 20-person shop at the time) was floored by my level of relevant experience.
I landed the interview in the first place through some folks I met helping out at the university LUG. So yes -- of course -- open source experience helps. That employer was an embedded Linux shop, and learning from some of the other folks they had on staff (a bunch of kernel developers, including two of Linus's lieutenants, a gdb maintainer, and a bunch of other really bright folks) is what I credit for getting my career off in the right direction; every job I've held since then has included some level of interaction with the open source community, and I've had a great deal of fun.
I work on the OpenNMS project and we have been participating in the GSoC. I have not been directly involved but I have seen some of the work done by our participants. It is interesting to watch them learn about how to interact and contribute to the project. Some of them had to learn some of the basics of the "work" environment like meetings, status reports, and meaningful commit messages, as well as how best to present their ideas. I watched one presentation by a student and it was better than most I have seen in my professional life. If this student was to ask me for a recommendation I would have no problem giving it based on the coding and communications skills he has demonstrated. I think that is where the real value.
Going and starting your own open source project is one thing, but you need to show how you work with others. I think there is more value in working on an existing project, showing how well you can work with others within a team. Plus you have an opportunity of networking with other developers.
For non-programmers, there are other ways to contribute to open source projects, through documentation, IRC, mailing lists, forum participation, and testing. Again you get a chance to interact and network with people. You never know when one of the people that you wrote documentation for or helped out on a mailing list might be your next boss or co-worker.
I built a business with unpaid open source programming. I say unpaid, because even though I was working as a consultant, the paid hours were very few and far between. I worked thousand upon thousands of hours over a period of years building a software package that sustains me to this day, almost thirteen years later.
At the time I did it though, there was a dearth of open source software. The space I chose, the electronic shopping cart, was wide open, and people were crying for anything that worked and was supported.
That is the key -- support. Decent programming and software is a must, but it doesn't need to be knock-your-socks-off great. If you can demonstrate you will be reliably there, month after month, year after year, I believe you be able to do what I did.
However, I don't think it has much to do with "50,000 IT jobs lost". What I described takes hard work and initiative, as does any substantive contribution to an open source software package. The people demonstrating that type of ability are not the ones who are marginalized.
Sometimes it works the otherway around, as well. My company started using an opensource application, a coworker who was skilled in the language it was written in began helping out in development and customization of the app. Now he is paid in props/travel/little side cash by the initiator of the project and has increased his standing at the company because we use it so much. He knew nothing about it before we started using it. I agree with what others have said, there is no such thing as useless knowledge. No, it might not guarantee you a job, if you are looking for guarantees in life, then you are wearing shoes of sadness on failure feet.
only if the office PHB is not a moron.
If the PHB discounts your OSS work, you REALLY DO NOT want to work there.
Consider it a "has a clue" flag in the database. If they dont like the OSS work, the OSS flag is not set and you should exclude that place from your dataset.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The point here is that it's easier in a field where open source software is used, because the barrier of entry for actual hands on experience is lowered significantly. You can just download it and submit patches and participate in the actual development from your own home, and nobody has to know anything about you, so there are even no prejudices working against you which you may often encounter in a job environment, even if it's just people scrutinizing your age or what you wear.
Twinstiq, game news
When I interviewed for the developer job I've now held for the last seven years, the clincher was all of the Open Source projects I had written up to that point; particularly my Yahoo group chat client (RiffRaff, which has long since become obsolete). Good interview skills helped, but the long list of useful (at least to me) Open Source software I had created was what impressed the interviewers the most.
The general impression I made was that if I needed something, I didn't wait around for someone else to handle it; I took the initiative, and got it done myself.
Open Source didn't really help him land a job for what 9 years?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
After graduating from univ, I spent about four years in a small tech company which got pretty boring, so I quit and spent about one and half years working on OSS while doing part time consulting which was just enough to keep me from sinking financially. I made some progress on the open source project and got job offer from several pretty good companies. I landed on one of them and it's way better than my previous one in almost all aspects - the pay is much better and I have a lot of latitude in what I do at work. So, yeah, it defintely worked for me.
No post-high-school education here, but spending insane amounts of time beta testing, packaging, proof-reading documentation and generally getting my hands very very dirty with one particular Linux distribution landed me a job as a packager/documenter with the distro, and last month I "celebrated" my 8 year anniversary working with the same company (now working on security).
The thing that got me in, besides obvious skill, was the volunteer work and passion I put into the company so the end result was they gave me a cheque for doing in an official capacity what I'd been doing unofficially for months.
The nice thing about that is that it gave me the time to increase my knowledge and skills and has gotten me a number of minor little projects under my belt in that time as well as two significant projects (both more or less defunct now, but that's besides the point since both projects had more value to me in terms of what I learned by doing them).
What about PHB in HR as well the other HR people.
We want you to have real job experience and you don't get past them and to the real IT people who like work like that.
Unfortunately there are a lot of places where that kind of reasoning is applied by almost all HR drones and hiring managers. That's the reason for me going back to school to take a couple of "mickey mouse" courses, to be able to put stuff like "basic linux administration skills" on my resumé without having every company I apply for a job with dismiss me as "another loser who downloaded and installed Ubuntu and now thinks he's God's gift to UNIX administration" even though I state quite clearly that I have used various UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems since 1997.
Open Source experience outside of "real" jobs means a lot less these days with all the people who think they're experts because they managed to install Ubuntu (I was actually told at an interview that they used to consider "I use Linux at home" as a good thing but in the last couple of years they've started interpreting it as a sign of Dunning-Kruger effect).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Some of you younglings may think experience is overrated, that your degree from a party university should give you a free entry into an immediately high paying job. But this is the real world. Degrees are a dime a dozen and most resumes are padded. You need to prove to us old fogeys not just that you can code, but that you can code well, know how to design, now how to work in teams, won't go on a three month drinking binge the first time you get a bug logged against your software.
We want experience!
That's what internships are for. But getting an internship is almost as difficult as getting a regular position. Open Source Software lets you create your own internship. It lets you put down real experience on your resume. Even if you have real world experience, a lot of your code won't be public. But your Open Source Software will be, and interviewers can see your actual code.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
10 years ago, when it became obvious that my old job wasn't going to invest in any new technology, I spent some time picking up new skills. Instead of the C/C++ that would have been on my resume from that job, I was able to add Java, JavaScript, ASP, Perl...
I learned these skills while developing a web site on the side (w/ some downloadable code projects). Not only did posting my resume on the web site get me the cold call from a recruiter, but the web site also impressed the company that later hired me. Plus, they get to see your work without asking for sample code or having to worry about non-disclosure agreements.
Doing something like this on the side shows compassion for the technology and the desire for self improvement and keeping your skills up to date. On the other hand, we've hired people that had a great resume w/ open source involvement and had to let them go because they spent too much time on these projects.
Open source & side projects... are great, but DON'T do them at work. It could get you fired and is not a plus to a recruiter when it monopolizes all of your time.
When I went to the /. 10-year anniversary party, CmdrTaco was so impressed with my rim job skills, he hired me to be his toilet slave. When I'm not servicing him, he lets me develop Open Source software!
1. redacted.
2. How does one work for Drupal? It's not a company, it's a piece of software.
"only if the office PHB is not a moron."
Not really. I see lots of open source contribution as more likely to leak commercial code into open source projects.
Also, with the FSF going after all of these companies in court over GPL violations, why would I want to take a risk on a programmer that might "accidentally" add GPLd code in our codebase and risk the entire company's IP.
I happen to be a F/OSS advocate. But, I'm a little skeptical about the career value of volunteering your time for F/OSS projects. The problems, as I see it, are:
1) Most employers want five years of recent, verifiable, full-time, professional experience. That would be an awful lot of time to volunteer.
2) Offshore, and guest workers are still much cheaper. Maybe it's best for Americans to give up on software development, and let the offshore workers have it.
3) Even if an American can manage to get a development job, salaries are going down the toilet, as the market becomes glutted.
Both presidential candidates, and almost all of congress, are pushing for more guest workers. Bill Gates is petitioning for unlimited guest workers. Once the election is over, I think guest worker caps will be raised substantially, if not eliminated entirely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...are a big part of it. If you develop some software, and get it out there where people can try it, and comment on it, and you can react to those comments, it says a great deal about the skill set you possess. Generally speaking, open source is going to be the quickest way to accomplish this.
Our CS students seem to understand this innately - many of them develop open source projects - small, relatively specialized ones that are appropriate to to some of the specialties that exist in our department. To some extent, they have trained the local employers, who now want to see what kind of project the student has completed and what kind of reaction it gets from its community.
The problem, however, is that our department has been slanted in this direction for a long time, using Linux and other FOSS for just about everything, so we attract students and prospective employers who appreciate that. There may be a large cadre of local employers who feel ill-served by our approach, but if they exist they are almost invisible to us.
Anyone reading less than some 25 books a year is less likely to improve as fast as people who read a lot.
Okay, I gotta say this one is not necessarily true. I, for instance, tend to read about 10 books a year. Each is dense, and usually no less than 900 pages in length. Compare this with some of the people who work in my office. Several of them probably read 3 books a week, but still can't wrap their head around the fact that if they keep continuously clicking the "Search" button, it will take longer for their search to complete.
Now, there's a few possible reasons for this. The first one could be that I'm a software engineer (although one who has been forced into the role of web monkey by the current job market), whereas they are often-computer-illiterate call center agents. Maybe part of it is that I'm too lazy to code around this issue purely for the benefit of people who can't figure out how to use a web page. Maybe its because I read books on compiler design while they read harlequin romance novels. Could be any of these things. But based purely on number of books, they've got me beat.
PHP: - Sorry, OSS work does not count, besides I have never heard of that project. Have you done any real work in your life? ...
Linus: -
ok - there is no job problems. Jobs are a-plenty. I had offers from 4 companies and I've just (actually not yet) graduated.
Whats the big fuss. If you are good, you'll get a job.
Otherwise, you can always go to India and get a job there. Stop complaining.
Anyway, any place that looks at those certifications is likely to eat up anything you tell them anyway, because they usually don't know any better. A place where they ask you technical questions usually won't care where you learned the stuff, as long as you know your shit. I prefer the later type of setting myself.
Well, it's not that these courses are useless, it's just that most of the stuff in them is stuff I knew how to do back in the late 90's (and which are apparently considered advanced UNIX skills these days, like building apache+mysql+php on your own instead of running Synaptic and clicking on Apache, MySQL and PHP followed by the "install selected packages" button). So I'm basically taking these courses so that potential employers will know I'm not lying about my skills.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I'm a senior HP-UX & Linux sysadmin now purely thanks to free software such as GNU/Linux, BSD, HTTPD & MySQL which enabled me to start learning the concepts of Unix style OSs, databases and their benefits without having to shell out for expensive software packages and courses.
These skills then easily transferable to the other Unix OSs such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc. which you're unlikely to ever touch unless you're paid to do so.
CN=poolmeister.OU=lurkers.CN=slashdot
From EST, I went on to work for IBM, largely on my previous Linux and open source software experience. The technical interview was performed by the Solaris technical team lead, and all the questions he asked were directly Solaris related, though I translated the answers to what I knew about Linux. Eventually IBM ebusiness started offering Linux, and I joined that team.
After IBM, I went to work for a well known IT security training company for awhile, again supporting Linux servers (with a little OpenBSD). Except one project, all the work I did was on open source software and platforms. That particular company prefers "vendor neutrality" and open standards to be consistent with their course materials.
I now work for a small IT consulting startup that supports web operation infrastructure for various clients. Again I work with open source software - Linux, Xen, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Apache, MySQL, Postgresql, Perl, Puppet and others.
So what is the point? I've made my living off the last 10 years almost entirely on Open Source software. Certainly my knowledge and understanding of OSS has helped me in areas where I did support proprietary systems (Solaris for 2 years, AIX for 1 year) - and even then we used a lot of open source tools and technologies (at IBM no less). I am a big believer in open source, because I think it is the right tool for most scenarios. I encourage anyone currently looking at a career in Information Technology to become familiar with Linux in particular. Grab a copy of CentOS and get busy doing something useful with it, and you'll learn skills that employers actually do want.
But above all, do it only if you love it, or you'll hate your job forever.
..you are never "unpaid". Never. The immediate and primary currency -your pay- you receive at all times and in as large of amounts as you wish is other peoples code they freely share. You can take this huge amount that is out there and use it for any purpose you want, including engaging in this thing called "business" where you can get paid in another form of currency if you desire. If you want to know where computers and code are used so you can "get paid" in central bankers currency while working "a job", here is a handy reference to start your search from. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of listings in this reference manual all use computers and code in some fashion now-a-days, and most of them all will pay you in central bankers currency if you work a job with them. So you not only get paid, you get paid twice if you use open source. Kinda nifty.
I've gotten every single gig I've went for when I've included links to open source projects & forum posts I've been involved in, instead of a resume.
Not only does it showcase my skills, but with the inclusion of forum posts clients can get an idea of what it's like to work with me, which I think helps alot.
Why not just lie if you already know the material?
Employers may check degrees but they are not going to check on whether or not you actually completed a couple of night courses.
First, there should be clarification... IT does not always entail programming/development. So are we talking sysadmin or development here?
Second, regardless of some article saying IT jobs are going down the toilet, there has never been a better time in my career for me personally than now, as I am getting headhunters emailing and calling me regularly, as well as two outstanding offers to work elsewhere if I were to but want to. From my point of view there is a high demand for good developers right now that companies simply cannot seem to fill.
If you are a good, smart programmer with a decent amount of OSS under your belt and you don't gave a good job, you are doing something wrong.
This article points out that students can have an advantage from working on OSS projects.
In my case I have no education in programming, yet I work full time now on OSS software and get paid too. Im even turning down jobs because there is really too much work.
Id not be surprised if there are a fair few others like me.
I guess I'm just too honest, I really hate lying in that way. In many ways I think this is a serious hindrance when it comes to finding a good job, other candidates will gladly say they're experts at whatever the company wants them to be experts at and I'll tell the truth, guess who gets the interview/job?
But honestly, I'm happier knowing I'm not where I am because of my own dishonesty.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
>What happens to all of Google's APIs when Goolge declares bankrupcy?
I don't think the demise of some company named "Goolge" is going to affect them.
I know that the open source community has given a lot to me. I have been able to tackle some difficult coding tasks by being able to reference works already done by some different open source iniatives. I think the chicken-and-egg issue about the developers not having experience but needing it to get a job, is definitely something that if the developer could show they contributed meaningfully to an open source project would help there case trying to get a job. It looks good on the resume. I decided to try and give back to the open source community, and released one of my products as open source now. I am looking for anyone that wants to work on it, or just enjoy using it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pop3wizardnet/ I hope it helps someone save a few hours of headaches, considering it has weeks of work in it.
Just my experience, but if you're competition are from India, expect their resumes to be about 80% bold-faced lies. Honesty is a virtue in a technical interview because they'll figure out if you're lying and will crucify you if they catch you in one in most cases, but when it's managers and/or HR interviewing, remember that they can't tell the difference between the 20% truth and 80% lies.. which won't work out for you so well if you're 100% honest. Just sayin. Posting AC because my experience could be taken as racism... :(
with open sourced direct competitors to large scale apps (smaller than, say, MS Windows, but on the scale of AutoCAD, etc.)?
I'd like to see a world where those new outsourced East Indian millionaire and sub-millionaire programmers are forced to compete heavily with FREE software.
Make everything open source and completely poison the IT offshore programming market. Nobody (at least no consumer, and few businesses but the really biggest ones) pays for commercial stuff because they can get it for free on freshmeat.net!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Agreed. For my last promotion HR didn't consider me "qualified enough" even though my boss assured them that I was more than capable of taking on the increased responsibilities. In the end the job posting had to be retracted, and the job description/requirements rewritten in order to fit my paper credentials more closely.
Now, this was for an existing employee (me) that was already known to the people who would do the final hiring. If you were some unknown applicant out of college however, you'd get tossed in the circular file and nobody would ever know any different.
As to the "you don't want to work there" part stated by the GP - be real. The economy is on the way to tanking. People have bills to pay. If it's the difference between living on the street and a roof over my head I'd be willing to dig shit all day - programming for clueless people is one heck of a step up from that.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I landed a job as a PLC programmer (for those who don't know - I basically write code for micro controllers used for industrial automation) without a degree, based almost entirely on sample code I'd written as a member of the OSS community. There are plenty of jobs in this corner of the field, both on the back and front-ends (SCADA software). The hours can suck, and bugs in your code have the potential to cause hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company I work for does a lot of wastewater automation, which means some on-site work can come with a foul odor. It's not google, but it is specialized enough so that a few years experience is usually rewarded with a large jump in pay, and companies like mine usually have good bennies and retirement plans and job security is the best I've seen in the IT world. I'd encourage any disgruntled code monkey to look into it!
Do you have a job that you landed because of your unpaid open-source programming?
No, but technically I did do lots of personal projects that I wasn't paid for, and just never released it. Which most definitely helped land me my first job.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Yeah because
./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local --with-gd
make
make test
make install
Is so very tough
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I agree, it's not very tough, but compared to clicking on "PHP" and then "Yes" when asked if you want Apache and MySQL as well it's pretty damn hard in the eyes of most people. And the type of skill is different.
Also, you're forgetting about things like build order, you can't DL and compile php and apache before MySQL, and you forgot about the --prefix argument for the configure script. I'm still not implying this is rocket science, just that knowing how to properly build these three pieces of software takes a wee bit more understanding than clicking the big Install button and letting Synaptic install it automagically.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yes, it helped me. I did volunteer work running Linux servers with community activist groups (eg IndyMedia), and leveraged that into being a sysadmin at a large telco. Admittedly I already had IT experience (Windoze), but my volunteer experience helped me move away the dark side :-)
True, but I think once I got into Linux and got past the OMFG this is too much. I came to realize that it wasn't too difficult to actually read a README, or an INSTALL doc, and there are tons of places to find actual help from people that don't give you the whole "I'm more 1337 than you". Plenty of times I've needed help to figure out why something was broken, and every time someone in the Linux community rose to the task and rendered assistance.
The best thing I have come away with using Linux is a better understanding of how programs I run interdepend on each other, like you stated about PHP and Apache before MySQL.
My fave was making my home box a game router using IPTABLES.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Understanding? You're still not doing anything that requires any 'understanding', you're just executing whatever 'build/configure' script the developers have already set up for you, which works just as well whether it's typing some arcane commands into a terminal that they describe in an INSTALL documentation somewhere, or executing a command in an automatic package manager GUI. There's no difference in the 'type of skill', since there isn't any required except knowing how to read and follow directions in either case. Unless you're doing something like making custom changes to the source before compiling (which would require actual skill), you're just wasting your time with an outdated manual process. Anything that's 'hard' doesn't mean that it requires skill to accomplish, it could also mean that there's an easier solution, though I suppose discovering that may require some 'skill' of its own.
Well, I do know how to code C and have changed the configure scripts of various pieces of software on many occassions, nice AC attempt at an ad hominem attack though.
Also, being able to understand "To instals teh inartwebz servar u clic teh 'intarwebs servur' buton n like install" isn't the same as understanding a 10 kiB INSTALL file with sections named "Compilers and options", "Compiling for multiple architectures", "Defining variables" and so on...
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4