I've honestly never been at a job interview where people gave a crap about my open source contributions. They're typically much more interested in hearing war stories from the closed source projects I've worked on.
The thing about open source projects is, they tend to be slightly generic things like "file format," "widget library," or "machine learning algorithm" that most companies see as the kind of thing they can typically get for free from open source. (They're not wrong there - the fact that we're talking about my open source contributions here makes it almost tautological.) They also tend to involve the sorts of generic programming skills that, by virtue of being stuff that we all know at least somewhat well, aren't all that valuable. Supply and demand works with job skills, too.
By contrast, my commercial work tends to involve a lot of specialized knowledge that's quite uncommon, and also tends to produce the kinds of software that people are quite happy to pay a lot of money for.
> I've honestly never been at a job interview where people gave a crap about my open source contributions. They're typically much more interested in hearing war stories from the closed source projects I've worked on.
To be fair, that's like the guy that wrote moment-js or jQuery. I've worked at a number of Perl-based companies and every single one used DateTime (I'm a huge fan, btw). Something like that is going to be noticeable on a resume. Assuming they have some experience with Perl.
There was a company I know of that was advertising in their job postings that the guy that wrote Perl's DBI once worked for them or was their CTO or whatever. That was about 6 years ago, so not that far off.
Ha. I had actually thought about mentioning that this situation seemed to be very different 20 years ago, but decided I had already done enough blathering.
But, anyway, yeah - I think that this was different 20 years ago, back when open source hadn't quite completely disrupted the software industry and companies didn't yet understand the economics of open source.
I mean, I worked with someone who creates a very high profile OSS project, and I'm sure it's a big reason he got hired to where he is.
I'll never say OSS is an optimal career path unless you are doing something extremely specialized (which to be fair, he is). But it sure can open doors for you even today if that's something you're passionate in. For me, I got around without any OSS, so it's more like a post-career plan now to help out some beloved repos.
(as long as you're not stupid, like showing your botting repository to an online game studio).
> I've honestly never been at a job interview where people gave a crap about my open source contributions.
They gave a crap about mine, I believe for two reasons: first, I put it in the middle of my CV, at the same level as my regular job. This basically forces everyone to talk about it. Second, Monocypher is a crypto library, and cryptography tends impress people.
I can't speak for other companies, but as a person involved in hiring, open source is very valuable to me.
It's not valuable in terms of potential to market/usefulness/popularity, rather, because I can see very clearly how a person designs/writes code, and how they solve problems, when they have plenty of time; I can also see other non-technical aspects, like how they structure their git history (which, to me, has lot of signals).
People (rightfully) dislikes to show their capacity under pressure; open source is the way to show it without pressure :)
