Ask HN: Why is open source relevant in jobs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is open source relevant in jobs?

6 pointsmuzani15 comments

I'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.

If it was to see whether I can code - I've definitely got quite a few projects that people can touch and play with (the perks of being an app developer).

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.

I don't really understand why open source is so big. Is there anything that I'm missing here?

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"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...

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.".

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That makes sense, but in my case, I actually have a lot of full app releases which are more complex, with higher ratings than most jobs I'm applying for. Skill level and interest is no question.

What I wonder is that sometimes it seems to be a moral stance. You can see all these companies proud of what they contribute to OSS, using that fact to attract engineers. So it's not just about skill and passion.

I'm a good developer and don't write any open source code and I don't have anything on GitHub.

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.

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.

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