I like the rest of the article but this statement is disturbing. There are plenty of great open source projects which never got off the ground in terms of popularity.
Quality is not necessarily correlated with popularity.
a) doesn't require a lot of resources to make a meaningful contributions (access to a computer and the internet) that could land you a really good job.
b) it's probably the only industry that doesn't requires formal education. Case in point, only one person at my company has a CS degree, and that's me.
There are cases. But most probably are survivorship bias.
I would bet, most current IT professionals have a at least lower middle class background.
If I take a look at my company, that at last rings true. Not sure about the US, though.
I don't quite understand why people seem to think success doesn't require sacrifice anymore. You can either sacrifice your time and money for a more streamlined education and get a college degree or you can sacrifice a lot of your time and take a risk to self-educate.
There's really no middle ground and both strategies can land you a job if you're good, but becoming good always requires effort and some sacrifice.
I think this is because large majority of tasks do not require formal education (proverbial CRUDs etc.). And that's OK.
For the record I've got a master degree in CS but I can't remember last time I had to utilize that knowledge. Hobby projects? Sure. But not daily work.
Great article by the way! I was also on the side of "it's hard to do PRs and github as resume is a bad idea" but it turns out that it's surprisingly easy to start and the experience of working with people that have similar interests is really fun!
The line about "survivorship bias" also jumped out at me as out of place. It's probably a phrasing thing, but I think granting that survivorship bias could be a factor, even as you assert that it is not a dominant factor, would have made the piece stronger. The way it was phrased seemed to deny the possibility, causing me to raise an eyebrow in skepticism, but that doesn't seem to be what you believe.
I absolutely agree with your central thesis that open source can provide a ladder for the underprivileged. At the same time, it's also undeniable that some people are constrained from contributing to open source due to economic and social circumstances, and I don't think those two ideas conflict. Does that make sense?
Popularity isn't the real issue - it's, "What can you do?" or, "Show me what you've done."
When interviewers say, "Tell me about yourself," from my own experience, they mean - what can you do? Not hobbies.
Photographers and designers create portfolio websites to get clients (instragram too). Github or OSS provides the same for programmers.
Doctors and other professionals do the same by placing their certificates, awards, certifications on walls for their clients to see. And gain trust.
In summary, the open source project does not have to be popular. It just simply a proof of ability.
Eh, it definitely is correlated. Maybe you wanted to say correlation is not perfect?
One of my open source projects has almost 5K stars on Github so I should be preaching with the choir here but that would be disingenuous.
I think that a lot of it comes down to having perfect timing... The kind of timing that only dumb luck can deliver.
Building a decent quality project is just the baseline requirement...
Saying that project quality or usefulness is the determining factor to achieving popularity in open source is like saying that having a pair of legs is the determining factor to being qualified for the 100m sprint in the olympics.