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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.
pointy-eared 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.
Damn those elven bosses!!
Protip: It's pointy-haired boss.
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 ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
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.
There are many reasons to look for developers via their OSS contributions:
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.