
Recommendations for building a career in open source - jonobacon
https://opensource.com/business/16/8/building-career-open-source
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jondubois
Open source is not a good career path. It's hard. Bastard hard. It took me 5
years of running open source projects before one of my projects got popular.

What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I
want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders.

That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source.
If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily
have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have
very little savings.

Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't
expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have
thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or
Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career
opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own
Facebook stock.

Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually
one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough
have any community around it at all.

Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code...
Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will
succeed.

~~~
jondubois
If you want to get an idea for how difficult a career choice open source is:

I'm currently working to monetize my open source project with
[https://baasil.io/](https://baasil.io/) (with some cofounders) - The
surprising thing I learned is that investors do NOT care AT ALL that your OSS
project has almost 20k downloads per month and that you spent 3+ years of your
life on it and are fully dedicated to it. Employers care, other developers
care, but to an investor, it means nothing.

I applied to a startup incubator in Sydney several months ago; I showed them
all my project stats (it's probably one of the most popular open source
frameworks to come out of Australia). I hussled hard; I even managed to get
tickets to a few investor conferences and events and, each time, I would talk
to every person in the room. I ended up securing a coffee meeting with an
investor (after talking to him at two different events; 3 if you count the
fact that I had actually talked to the guy on the phone 2 years before about
what I was planning to do; so he knew I was serious) and he recommended that I
apply to an incubator in which he was a director.

I applied; but I didn't even end up getting into the first round of interviews
(they just didn't understand the product or the market)! They selected a bunch
of other startups (some of which didn't even have a proof of concept to show).

Maybe the experience would have been different in another country.

~~~
inputcoffee
I like the honesty of your answers.

I think an investor would care more if it were making money, or if there was a
way to make money. I think charging is a great way to demonstrate that.

You could also just add a voluntary payment and see if people just send some
money your way.

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gaius
Realistically if you want to be paid to work on open source, work for Oracle,
IBM, Red Hat et al

~~~
scholia
True, but it probably reduces the range of products you can work on ;-)

~~~
cyphar
That's not really true for SUSE (I work there), and I doubt it's true for
RedHat and similar companies. As long as it doesn't impact your L3 bug
squashing abilities, and it is at least tangentially related to what your team
focuses on then there's no problem.

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ashitlerferad
Some more great advice on negotiation of employment contracts for open source
jobs:

[https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/](https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/)

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niroze
You build a career doing a job and solving problems, using specific skill
sets.

Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid to work on opensource projects or
projects you've worked on become opensource.

I've built a career on open source technologies, mainly as a hobby that I
turned into a job :)

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maxxxxx
It seems to me that you need to be a good writer and be an interesting speaker
at conferences. Just writing open source code is probably not a good career
path. At least if you want to make some money.

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sytse
Nice article from the best community expert out there.

I think the natural trajectory for a developer can be something like:

1\. Work on it as a hobby

2\. Hobby gets a bit too serious

3\. Start charging an hourly fee

4\. Get hired by company sponsor or start company

