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Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Open Source Jobs?

Posted by timothy on from the employment-wants-to-be-free dept.

stry_cat writes "My company has bought into the FUD and is going 100% Microsoft. Rather than work in this environment and be continuously at odds with upper management, I have decided to seek employment elsewhere. Where do I look for an open source job? I've started with the local paper's Sunday classifieds. I've looked on dice.com and monster.com. However almost all are Microsoft related. The few that aren't are some sort of dinky contract or temp job. So is there a place to find a job in an open source environment?"

4 of 506 comments (clear)

  1. Unanswerable by jemtallon · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm afraid this question is unanswerable as we don't know what type of job you:
    a. Like to do
    b. Have already done
    c. Are good at

    Please be more specific in future requests for assistance.

  2. In Open Source, the job finds you! by ccguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Bad joke in the subject, but it's true. I've found that submitting patches to a established open source project is the easiest way to find a job, in fact without moving a finger.

    Starting a decent open source program is even better. My pet project ccextractor is a very niche things yet I get offers for customizations / deployment / etc very often (to me often here is something like twice a month).

  3. Open source areas by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Mozilla Foundation is hiring. They even have a billboard on 101 near San Francisco: "Work for mankind, not for the man".

    Most of the hosting, "cloud", data mining, and data warehousing industry is Linux based. The infrastructures of the big players like Google and Facebook are all Linux. Once you get off the desktop, Microsoft isn't dominant.

  4. Re:All around...oh, wait, you mean the PAYING ones by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's tons and tons of open-source jobs out there. One of the keywords here is "Android". The other keyword is "embedded". Linux and Android are being used for all kinds of embedded devices now, and there's tons of jobs for people using C and C++ (C more at the low levels, kernel, device drivers etc., C++ at the higher levels for applications). People who can work with and build embedded Linux systems are in high demand, and there's good demand for Qt C++ programmers too as that's being used a lot on these embedded devices that have touchscreens.

    Now, this doesn't necessary mean you'll be doing a lot of contributions upstream to the open-source community, but you will be working with a lot of OSS components, and developing proprietary software that interacts with them. And you definitely won't be doing any work with MS technologies, as those have no place in an embedded system (there are some places using WinCE, but they're dying out and many are switching to Linux or Android).