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?

Comments

Doesn't work for me

[4D6963]

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.

Re:Doesn't work for me

[epiphani]

I've been working on my open source project for about ten years now, and it has played a major role in every single job that I've held.

I got my present job through someone I worked on the project with. I've been there 4.5 years.

I also got involved in a local unix users group by way of hearing about it from some friends of the open source project. The connections I made at that users group have gotten me the job I will be starting in one month.

My open source project, however idle it has been for the last several years, has contributed significantly and directly to my career.

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.

Get used to it. Unless you want to crank out business rules written in Java, systems administration/engineering/architecture is the place to be, IMHO. In those teams you can actually do work in C, mess around inside the kernel, and actually make use of all your skills. "Programmers" these days actually seem pretty boring unless you're working for a tech company that has an exceptional software engineering department doing something interesting.

Re:Doesn't work for me

[Lumpy]

Because you are doing it wrong, marketing yourself wrong.

I trot out my OSS projects not as "I work on this free thing on the side" but as "I invented and designed product X, I am a volunteer lead developer for Project Y, and I saved project Z and single handed brought it from a failure to a viable product.

You need to take marketing classes, you gotta market yourself and network hard with people in the field. Hell get an article published in Dr Dobbs or another programming rag and your value goes up even farther.

You market yourself as a one trick pony. you gotta have a list of tricks to dazzle them.

Re:Doesn't work for me

[DrgnDancer]

I hate to say it, but that's a pretty arcane bit of coding you've done there. Having taken a sound processing class at university, I'd probably hire you on the spot if the damn thing works like you say it does. Purely on the "If he can figure out how to do this on his own, he'll probably figure out whatever I set him" theory. On the other hand, a lot of people are going to look at this like it's an impractical exercise outside of a few very specific applications.

You might try volunteering some time on a larger project with a more understandable goal. This gives you a) practical experience working with a team (usually pretty important in development work), b) something that an average manager will understand when you show them what you did, and c) a potential reference from someone else in the team who is already in industry and thus has standing to recommend you.

Your personal project has two thing working against it as useful "experience". First, few people are going to really understand what you did, or how difficult it was. Second, you're not actually getting what they would consider useful professional experience. "Real" projects are developed by teams, with schedules, check-ins and outs, a team leader that everyone else reports to, and some sort of hierarchical development plan. This is often more than half of what companies want to see when they ask for "experience". They assume people learned how to pound code into an IDE in in university, they want to see that you can fit into a dev team and do your part.

Worked for me

[goofy183]

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.

Re:But how does it help non programmers and PHB wh

[Lumpy]

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.