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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?
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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Open Source didn't really help him land a job for what 9 years?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
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!
"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
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: -
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
..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 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.
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