Ask HN: Have you ever been hired because of open-source contributions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever been hired because of open-source contributions?

31 pointsmothhabit22 comments

One of the most publicized advantages of contributing to open-source projects are the (supposed) better odds at landing jobs. I think that people shouldn't be contributing to open-source just to land better jobs and then forget it, but I ask myself if that premise is true in the first place.

Have you ever been hired because of some open-source contribution? Or do you know someone who was?

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Not me but - I had a friend, and he was a humble guy so I know he was not bragging, had added / fixed somethings in an open source library. I think it was C++. He was contacted for an interview at Google. The Google person said it was because they saw what he had added. He declined. Which did not surprise me, as I am sure he would not move his family. But this was a number of years ago.

IMHO - if you need to justify your skills, as in you are new, or have been out of work, then contributing to an open source would increase your credibility.

Yes.

I worked at AWS Professional Services. I was also on a skunkworks unofficial team that supported an added features to a popular in its niche open source AWS project.

We would add features to it based on customer paid projects we were doing, or just to scratch an itch.

When I was Amazoned, there were a couple of other consulting companies who had as a “nice to have” experience implementing and modifying the project. I had basically insta offers once I told them that I was the third highest contributor on the project and could point to features that they used that I implemented.

I also had a few other personal open source projects in the niche that I had released to the official AWS open source GitHub organization that gained a little traction. But solved real world problems.

I would not spend anytime doing open source work off hours. I got paid for my open source contributions.

In today’s environment, no one is going to take the time to look at your GitHub profile. The only reason mine gained any traction was because I targeted a niche where I know companies were using the project and I was a major contributor

People don't go looking on your github, but I have a (small) OSS section above my experience on my resume. It just lists 3 bullet points, including a big apache project I worked on, and some other notable projects.

Does this thread suffer from survivorship bias?

I got so frazzled during the last interview I had that I completely forgot to mention my open source contributions. Normally it’s something I’m pretty proud of..

I got a job ages ago by reaching out to folks in my open source community (Debian), eventually it turned into a job contributing to open source.

BTW: there are jobs working on open source, some resources:

https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

I used to work with a Qt consultant, who is a frequent KDE contributor also. He mentioned that he got that job through that - he kept pushing usable contributions until one day he got a mail asking he wanted to do the same for money too. (Damm, that guy was expensive. But also, he knew his stuff, we kept him around for as long as we could - we were not the ones offering him the job, we were a customer of the company that employed him)

Kinda. I've been approached quite a few times by different companies as a direct result of it, but I've always turned them down as I wasn't looking for a new job.

It's not due to random contributions here and there, but from being a primary maintainer of a piece of software that these companies have built a lot of their architecture around, or that they are building a competitor to.

In my current job, I was hired based on my previous professional work as a DevOps engineer for a three month emergency job, in order to set up a basic CICD pipeline for a project. Two months in, once the basics were in place I pivoted to embedded software development in that same project and I'm still there nine months later.

I didn't have any professional experience in that particular area, but that pivot was possible thanks to my previous open-source work and general faffing about with low-level stuff. That part gave me an edge during the interview over the other candidates, to the point that they straight up selected me without even seeing the rest.

Open-source work is like professional work for a job: the experience is relevant if it's applicable for the job at hand. Writing boatloads of NPM modules will not help much if the job is about working with resource-constrained microcontrollers and real-time operating systems.

Not an answer to your question, but I have been bootstrapping a company and used domain experts as contractors, some of which I’m hoping to turn into full time offers.

I’ve approached them exclusively by looking for the exact kind of experience I need on github: this way I know they can deliver what I’m looking for.

This approach means there’s no need for an interview and the person starts getting paid from the first minute of work once they accept short cold email.

So far these have been the creators of small specific projects, under 100 github stars. Not world-class revolutionary, but of significantly higher quality than college coursework and a lot more polished and finished than any of my spare time side projects.

I wouldn’t encourage anyone to count on this for finding employment though - traditional methods are far more likely to land you a job or contracting work by many, many orders of magnitude.

Yes, kind of.

When I was applying for a contractor job to Intuit a faulty publication of my tool to NPM broke an upstream project that resulted in an outage for the guy interviewing me.

When I joined Bank of America I discovered people were widely using my tool as one of two critical dependencies of a widely used IDE plugin. When they became known people then stopped using the browser plugin. JavaScript, at that time, had an extreme aversion to any kind of software written by known or trusted people. Software had to be little more than copy/paste and had to come from unknown strangers.

Otherwise, no. Open source contributions have largely just been a distraction from employment history, which is really the only part of the resume people seem to read.

I have never received a job offer because of a specific open source contribution.

However, I am sure my numerous contributions (including some large projects like Vim) shined a positive light on my resume/portfolio and helped get me in the door.

Its not about contributing to open source, its about demonstrating that you can deliver stuff. Open source is a way to do it, but not the only way.

I dont have a github, but Ive only been rejected one time, which was for a crappy job anyways. In intervews I talk about extremely technical things I worked on during my times at other companies, and its usually at a level above what the interviewer understands (for example, impelenting a library that decodes fax data, made harder by ancient documentation) so I look really good.

There is a huge difference between contributing to open source and delivering business value where you have to deal with stakeholders, work with a known set of requirements and deal with organizational and time constraints

In some open source projects you have to deal with stakeholders, work with a known set of requirements and deal with organizational and time constraints.

If I’m just volunteering, I can choose what to work on, when to work on it and there is absolutely nothing at risk. What time constraints am I under if I’m just volunteering?

There is at least something at risk if you work on something people start to use because people start to have expectations about it continuing to be useful. They want bugs fixed, new features, the project not to die, etc. One risk is you make a lot of people upset. Another risk is you're viewed as irresponsible for starting something and leaving it half-finished.

So if you're "just" volunteering and don't deliver you possibly risk as much as your career.

The time constraints you're under are the time constraints of your free time in your life.

I did a really great conversation during the interview about my open-source contribution.

And from my side, I think it's great for juniors engineers to be a part of some open-source

Not hired, as I didn't pursue it further, but I've been offered a job from contributing to a relatively popular but dying open source project some years ago.

All my random open source contributions/projects I think have helped. Especially since I've been working in a niche like Salesforce, it really gives me a leg up to show that I've built stuff in nodejs, c#, etc.

The other gain is that I learned a lot from those, and that will show through in an interview regardless of whether they looked at my GitHub or not.

I used to work on an open source project at Netflix. I had a coworker who was hired directly because of her open source contributions.

Not for contributions only, but developing ExtFUSE [1] got me a lot of offers and consulting work.

1. https://github.com/extfuse/extfuse optimizes FUSE with eBPF

Yes, at a very large company, though I still had an interview. No coding interviews though, I skipped that part.

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