
Ask HN: Why is open source relevant in jobs? - muzani
I&#x27;ve been looking at quite a few jobs and it seems that a lot of companies put open source experience as a requirement. Open source is never mentioned in my home country, but seems to be in a lot of job requirements in Western countries.<p>If it was to see whether I can code - I&#x27;ve definitely got quite a few projects that people can touch and play with (the perks of being an app developer).<p>Some companies I work for put in the contract that all code written while employed belongs to the company. So it puts me at a disadvantage when job seeking.<p>I don&#x27;t really understand why open source is so big. Is there anything that I&#x27;m missing here?
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diezge
_" Some companies I work for write the contract that all code written while
employed belongs to the company."_

That's why - because it shows evidence of code you produce, are interested in
coding on a personal level (as opposed to doing it purely for the paycheck),
how you solve problems, how you document code, how well you communicate with
others etc.

It does feel like having an active Github is almost a requirement these days -
but there are plenty of people who feel this is unfair, see for example ->
[http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-
an...](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-
community)

~~~
romanovcode
The link you gave had a good title, but terrible content. You pretty much can
stop reading on first paragraph when it says: "A quick glance through the list
shows that the overwhelming majority of these users are white men.".

~~~
diezge
I think the content itself is factual and relevant - I'm personally not a fan
of the way US-centric identity politics polarise groups of peoples either, but
once you get over this aspect the ideas behind it make more sense.

------
TurboHaskal
They may be looking for developers that are more likely to work unpaid time.
Or they might want to know whether you can work on your own without being
supervised.

My guess is mere cargo cult.

------
iurisilvio
I don't really care if you have your open source project. You can just
contribute to some project you like/use. This is how open source works.

The most important thing about it is to understand if you are able to dig
someone else's code and fix/improve it. This shows a lot about you. It is your
code and you have to interact with other (good) people. It is a social
experience.

------
atroyn
Cynical answer: because companies want to see that you'll write code for free,
so you'll never ask for a raise or overtime.

The less cynical answer is because working on some open source thing at least
exposes your willingness to contribute, look at other peoples' code etc. It
can be hard to tell how much someone actually contributed just by looking at a
CV.

~~~
insoluble
> It can be hard to tell how much someone actually contributed just by looking
> at a CV.

While this is true, it can also be hard to tell how much of a person's open-
source code was actually written by that person. With the abundance of code
available today, it would be relatively trivial for someone to take random
code fragments and functions from all around and to assemble them together
into a conglomerate. All the person would have to do is basically change the
variable and function names, in addition to the syntactic style, to make it
all appear as coming from the same person. Sure, this would at least show an
awareness of syntax and style, but it certainly would not show the level of
programming skill or even necessarily of problem-solving ability. On the other
hand, if the person's repo is popular, then there is at least an indication of
function and utility.

~~~
atroyn
There is also having pulls accepted on open source, e.g. fixing bugs in
various libraries and so on - one doesn't need to start a whole OSS project
from scratch to contribute.

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mattkrea
In my experience, developers with GitHub repos or other work usually are more
interested in what they do. For me, that translates to people that are proud
of the code they write and more interested in the job rather than someone that
just comes in and churns out code without consideration for others or the long
term.

~~~
kasey_junk
You should be aware that your bias is ruling out tons of great developers.
Defence, finance, biotech, etc. frequently have very restrictive ip agreements
with their developers, such that if they do have public repos it will
certainly be at best toy examples.

~~~
mattkrea
We don't rule them out by any means but it is a big plus. If someone
demonstrates in an interview that they have an interest (we usually have a
brief test we send out via email just to see how they do also) we're totally
fine with that.

------
ddorian43
Which is your home country? Because it's the same in mine and the reason is
the local market here sucks.

I've applied to many companies that required opensource and just flat-told
them that I only have private projects to show. So I have a couple private
projects that I can share the repo (ask the previous employer about it) and
have not been rejected for this. The reason is they just want to see your
code, how you write docs, readmes, commits, tests, schemas etc.

The "all your code are belong to us" clause is just a negative side of a
company. Either don't work for them, ask them if you can use their source only
to show to other clients, or lie and also work on something else behind their
backs that you can show to your next employer.

~~~
muzani
I'm in Malaysia. Yeah, the local market sucks here too.

On the flip side, a metric like this has made some people a little too GitHub
happy. They would put up private code because they liked the little activity
indicators, and commit every 15 minutes of work. But now that I think of it,
maybe they were fishing for another job.

