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

Posted by samzenpus on from the getting-hired dept.

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.

4 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Lots of Interview but no job... yet by Foofoobar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I created API I/O Abstraction, APIObject and API Chaining, show them working in Grails API Toolkit, am developing them out in spring-boot and have been interviewed by Amazon, Apple, Paypal, Netflix, Comcast... literally everyone but Google. But have yet to land a job. Mainly because from what I am told, my work is great but too cutting edge, just what they need but would require a rewrite, fantastic but not in the tools they want, etc etc. I'm finding you can create tools that will change the world but even if everyone agrees that they would and that they need them, they may not be ready.

    --
    This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
    1. Re:Lots of Interview but no job... yet by Foofoobar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not really. They interview me BECAUSE of my tools and development. They see what I am developing and thats the main reason they want to interview me. I remember Apples excuse was that they didn't even fully support REST yet. Amazon interviewed me 3 different times, were completely confused and in the end , rejected because I don't have a degree... regardless of the fact I'm a founding team member. PayPal just couldn't find a team to put me on. As the saying goes, it would be a comedy it it wasn't a tragedy :)

      --
      This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
    2. Re:Lots of Interview but no job... yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No offense meant but I would look at your non-technical skills. Verbal communication, interpersonal skills, etc. , While the excuses you are hearing can certainly happen, they are fairly rare. Most of the time the discussion goes more like "He seems really smart but..."
      "do you think he'll stick around"
      "he has an attitude that wouldn't gel well with the team"
      "he'll probably crack under pressure"

  2. OSS projects are great for hiring developers by Guy+Smiley · · Score: 4, Interesting
    When I worked at a small (Linux-centric) startup, we almost exclusively looked for contributors to OSS projects related to our business when trying to hire developers. I was even hired originally due to my OSS contributions (which had been more of a hobby before that point) and have worked for the past 15 years on very interesting (and highly paid) projects as a result.

    There are many reasons to look for developers via their OSS contributions:

    1. Their contributions and interaction with the rest of the community (either as founder of their own small project, or contributing to another project) were much more easily visible than any resume or job interview, since it made it much more clear what kind of person they were in real life and not what they were faking up for show.
    2. The code contributions showed the quality of the developer "doing their own thing", and not their hand-picked and cleaned-up portfolio, so it gave a much better idea of what kind of developer they really were. Did they know the details of some code and could solve complex problems? Was their code completely crap and clueless? That is difficult to judge otherwise.
    3. That they even spend time contributing to OSS projects means that they actually enjoy software development, and hacking on code in that area, and aren't just looking for a job to make ends meet.
    4. It allowed us to find a large number of people that would never have applied to our company, but were interested in working for us once contacted.

    For the first 3-4 years of that company, we only ever hired developers via our own searching, or other top notch developers they knew from previous jobs.

    I would strongly recommend that developers contribute to OSS projects as a result. One of the difficulties of new grads is that they aren't able to get experience in some area, but contributing to an OSS project is "free experience building" for the developer in whatever marked segment they want to learn about. Becoming well known in a particular project (starting small and taking over progressively more complex tasks) not only builds a lot of experience, it increases their reputation in that community, and will make them a much better hiring candidate even if they aren't cherry-picked in the manner I described above.

    It may even be that whatever OSS project they get involved in will become a startup of its own and they can get in on the ground floor and make their own job.