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Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

Too-secret-to-blog-about work has a hefty opportunity cost and must be priced accordingly by a would-be employee.

When faced with the choice between unverifiable secret work or highly visible work (open source, name brand employer, etc.), be sure your compensation expectations are weighted to match the future marketability of the experience you stand to gain on the job.

It would be nice if prospective employers could just know that you are out there and that you are competent. Realistically they are going to prefer the safe bet presented by a known-good contributor with an impressive public portfolio.

Edit: rephrased to clarify my work sorting heuristic.

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That cuts both ways. If a track record of accomplishment in open source has market value, then companies offering that benefit can provide lower salaries. If on the whole open source software roles pay less, you can expect a different demographic of developers to work in those roles.

I don't really believe that exposure to open source projects has that much market value, though. I also think it's probably very hard to run a dev hiring pipeline that expects to primarily recruit people from open source projects. There are a whole lot of very talented developers who have spent their careers doing closed-source (i.e.: normal) software development.

I don't think that dpritchett was talking about open source vs closed source work. He was talking more about NDA-covered work, which could be on open or closed source code.

For most of the "normal" closed source work, it's easy to say that you worked on X product or feature, and can talk about some of the challenges that you encountered with it.

Contrast that with defense contract work that requires classified clearance. If you're a developer on that, you will most likely never be able to talk about it to most recruiters or interviewers before you retire. There is no way to actually talk about what you've done with the general public. That can hurt a career, especially if it puts a black hole in your experience on a resume.

Ah, I didn't pick that up from the thread. Fair enough; I agree, if you can't even talk about what you're working on in a future job interview, you should price that into your comp.

It may close off an outside career, but it also opens it up within the huge company that you are doing the secret work for.

I don't know of any reqs within my company (GlobalDefenseCorp) that indicate salary is increased when you go dark. Your compensation is that you get to work on cool shit, which will likely lead to another project in the same vein.

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