
Open-source skills best hope for landing a good job - abhishektwr
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/29/open_source_and_the_job_market/
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JohnnyBrown
The second-last paragraph makes a point I've seen touched on a few times but
never fully developed: That the labor of software developers is an economic
complement to code. When developers write code and release it for free, we are
commoditizing our complements [1]. Operating systems, libraries, frameworks
and the like increase the productivity of developers, so by making those
widely available, the demand for developers is increased.

Calling open source a "labor movement" as the OP mentions is not far off,
considering its effects on control of the means of production.

[1]<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html>

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danso
Question to all those in a hiring position: when looking at a candidates'
purported open-source credentials, how closely do you inspect the work? Enough
to tell if the improvement was fluff? Or a rehash of other code? If it looks
like said candidate has a lot of commits, how do you discern the ratio of
quality commits?

~~~
lpolovets
There are often too many applicants to spend more than 5-10 minutes looking at
any one person's resume and open source projects. I usually spend a few
minutes on the resume looking for interesting projects or relevant work
experience, and then a few minutes looking at an applicant's GitHub page (if
it's provided).

Things I look at on a GitHub page:

\- # of projects that are not forks. The person might have done a lot of work
on the forks, but it's too time-consuming to figure out what code is theirs
and what code is pulled from someone else.

\- The nature of the projects. Are they mostly trivial ("My .bashrc file") or
awesome ("In-memory distributed search engine with replication")?

\- Whether the person has good documentation skills. I look at a few sample
commit messages, project README files, docs within a few random source files,
etc.

\- Good coding skills: decent style, no red flags in terms of quality, well-
polished code, decent error-handling, etc.

From my perspective, a bad job on open source projects is a red flag, a good
job can really help you distinguish yourself, and anything else doesn't
significantly help or hurt your application.

~~~
aapl
The Impact graph on the Stats & Graphs page gives a quick summary of recent
major contributors to a repository. However, if you want to gauge the total
contribution of a person across all projects, you have to check the impact
graphs individually for each repository. Still no search for commits, it
seems.

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king_magic
Personally, I'm always pleased to see an open source project on a candidate's
resume (provided they contributed significantly to it, of course). It's always
a good way to evaluate a candidate's skills outside of a technical interview.

~~~
abhishektwr
I am just curios, how you evaluate the "contributed significantly" especially
if someone is contributing to documentation side of the project?

~~~
marquis
I would highly welcome a candidate who has proven clear documentation
abilities.

~~~
king_magic
As would I!

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daniel-warner-x
The appeal of hiring someone who is actively involved with open source tech
has less to do with heroic coding skills and more to do with identifying
someone who is a curious, enthusiastic, and community-minded problem solver.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Exactly! If you have an open source (or any other!) portfolio, you're already
ahead of 99% of the people I interview. Odds are that I won't actually look at
your code. Instead I'll ask you technical questions during the interview about
the project itself: architecture, design, problems you ran into and how you
solved them. How you handle bug reports, etc.

Pretty much the same thing I do with other projects on a resume, but much more
focused.

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sajidnizami
Is this the difference between US and UK market?

I remember reading something different for US:

[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-06/tech/30250041...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-06/tech/30250041_1_microsoft-
technology-microsoft-employees-microsoft-skills)

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DrCatbox
Most open source applications would include "Windows" in the skillset, so the
compariosn doesnt really hold. jQuery is crossplatform. They should have
compared "python, php" to "c#, java".

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georgieporgie
I don't see how this article demonstrated its claim in the least.

