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As a beginner myself I wouldn’t even know where to begin to contribute to something like Kubernetes and agree with your point. Those projects have a lot of eyes on them and the talent to follow, what value could I add as a beginner that someone with experience couldn’t do in a heartbeat(or hasn’t already).

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People with more experience have all their time taken up by big features and refactorings. In a big project, there are always small things to fix or improve. It's not like they run out, because those big changes create more small things to fix all the time. Linux is 30 years old, and it still accepts patches from beginners regularly.

I don't know about Kubernetes, but lots of large and well-managed projects have issues labelled as "good first issue" to help you know where to start.

Agreed. There are certainly challenges to working on big, high-visibility projects as a beginner. But, if it's primarily part of a strategy to get a well-paying job, it makes a lot of sense to work on something that has people from the companies that are hiring developers at decent salaries working on it.

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