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

Sounds like...

[Shados]

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.

Re:Sounds like...

[Narpak]

I guess the sum of the matter is that some of the open source principles makes it easier for students to access and participate in ongoing projects. Thus they can develop skills hard to come by otherwise. Only natural that this would give them an advantage when looking for steady work later on.

Newsflash!

[consonant]

Prior related experience works in your favour when applying for jobs in a particular stream!

Details at 11!

Re:Newsflash!

[moteyalpha]

I agree, I have been telling the women who want to be prostitutes in Vegas for a long time that I operate an open source prostitution business and they need to get experience if they want to be successful. I think that work in open source is an end in itself. I find that people who work in open source tend to be talented in many areas of technology. The open source is just a way to apply the knowledge in the broadest possible way.

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

[angusthefuzz]

Maybe you should get off your ARSS and try working for a different open source project?

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.

Unsure in Seattle

[OpenSourced]

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?

My IT experience

[skyggen]

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.

Working with Linux helped me get my first job

[Jim Hall]

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.

Worked for me

[cduffy]

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 created a business with my open source work

[mckyj57]

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.

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.