Using Your Open-Source Contributions To Land a Full-Time Job

Nerval's Lobster writes So you've worked on an open-source project, and you want to leverage that experience to move your career forward. In theory, there's no reason an employer should shun your experience, just because you did the project from home on your own time. But how can you actually leverage that project contribution into a full-time gig (assuming you want one, of course)? Developer Jeff Cogswell offers some tips: First, make sure that any project you present on your resume is a good one; pointy-haired bosses have a nasty habit of attribute the less-than-stellar elements of a project to you, even if you weren't responsible for them. Second, be prepped to talk about deadlines, bug reports and fixes just as if the project were something you'd done for a job instead of just the pleasure of contributing to something cool. Those are just a few of the ways to use open source to your advantage, but others abound.

Comments

Networking

[rtb61]

Computers aren't the only thing networking, people do it as well ;). One of the main things you do when contributing to an open source project is establish social and business relationships with those people most likely to be able to connect you to a job, directly and indirectly. Smart recruitment would have companies employ people to contribute to open source and specifically vet fellow contributors with a view to recruiting future staff. Basically companies can forgo the whole trial period of trial and error when it comes to recruiting essential staff by being able to assess potential employees in a voluntary work place over an extended period of time. FOSS is a public showcase of the efforts and abilities of skilled people and in terms of the relationships of the people involved, how well they work with others in a voluntary environment. Even when you are already employed it still remains the most viable opportunity to showcase all of your skills in a public environment and also to maintain multi-company and multi-national relationships with people that can help you define your future dependent upon of course how well you play with others. For all the three letter et al agencies around the world, it also provides the opportunity to resist the idiotic temptation to break global computer security and instead focus on gathering knowledge on relationships between the people involved and to do their own, ugh, recruiting ;).