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