Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

DyslexicAtheist

I use FOSS in my personal computing needs which heavily intersects with my professional interests. Using 3rd party (FOSS) exposes me to bugs, issues with documentation, problems running things on esoteric hardware, security issues, eventually performance issues. Because of this I often need feedback from maintainers and I'm at their mercy for how fast my issue is resolved.

Supplying a patch, giving feedback for issues, is the least I can do to give back to the people who took the time to write that code.

Because some projects I contribute to are also relevant in my day job I get a deeper insight into that part. Money/financial aspects do not play into that decision but I'd be twisting the truth if I didn't admit the positive impact FOSS had to my career.

Having contributed to FOSS projects in a public way also says something about the person I'm interviewing. If most of my stack is built on FOSS and an applicant comes along with a cool CV but has not one contribution to a single project it's immediately a hard pass from me. I never put applicants through silly technical screening sessions unless they are fresh outta university. But no public commits are a red-flag for senior engineers.

The idea that senior engineers need public commits to be even considered for a job seems a little extreme to me. There are myriad reasons why an extremely competent senior engineer might not have public commits.

The lack of public commits does not signal whether or not someone is a competent senior engineer.

I guess if the rest of the CV was a really strong match, I'd give them a chance but they'd have to do a "technical interview" same as any other junior. I can only speak for myself that I haven't seen many CV's in my environment where 98% of the stack is built on FOSS and 100% of the tooling uses FOSS that an expert in that field has never contributed anything to a FOSS project, has never asked a question on an issue or created an issue (and also lacks any other public facing work like personal projects, talks, blogs, etc). I'd also interview them if they were recommended by a colleague.

Big corp I work for will not allow me to write single line of code for open source projects. I might leak something confidential this way. The reality is not black and white like you try to paint it. Heck I had problems with leaking confidential information when supplied electrical diagram with mechanical drawing for one of the suppliers.

how much does your employer benefit from FOSS? if they do use it but prevent their own people from giving back it sounds like they're terrible people but also pretty dumb because they're losing out on building knowhow about those systems among their own workforce (I'm obviously not shocked if that is the case).

That’s exactly the case. We are allowed to do open source request, legal team writes a list what can we do (don’t share, don’t distribute, don’t release, internal use only, etc) and this goes on like this. Since legal team takes weeks, we write our own half baked solutions and use open source extremely seldom.

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