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

Job Training

[jelwell]

I got a job working at Netscape (Now Mozilla) because I spent my free time contributing reduced test cases to bugs through bugzilla. Asa Dotzler, volunteered his time managing people like me, and picked up a job similarly. I referred Blake Ross to Netscape shortly after I joined because he was working with us, helping with bugs. The key for all of us, was that contributing allowed us to get job training - training that Netscape wouldn't have to provide. It's tough for a hiring manager to determine if someone is skillful based on their resume, but it's easy to see how someone will fit in your organization when they're already contributing to it.
Joseph Elwell.

Beware the double edged sword

[Rinikusu]

Before too long, some PHB will read through something like this and expect *all* developers to want to work for free.

Re:Lots of Interview but no job... yet

[AmiMoJo]

It sounds like you have two choices. Either write some software that uses your API to demonstrate just how it will change the world (and don't be disappointed when it doesn't, it can still be extremely valuable anyway), or look to get other OS developers on-board so that the system becomes more popular.

In either case, the goal is to take it from being an academic exercise to something that people actually use, and thus there is demand for. OS software that no-one uses isn't very likely to get you hired, unless you are very lucky and someone happens to be looking for that exact thing.