Why your company should hire open source developers | Hacker News Reader

Why your company should hire open source developers

blogs.techrepublic.com.com

21 pointsedw51918 comments

I think the article is technically referring to traits commonly found in project leads in open-source. As opposed to, people who make only occasional, minor contributions to well-established projects, or just toss up random code snippets on a blog, never to be updated again.

I am not at all criticizing the value of these other forms of contributions to open-source. But I am skeptical that an interviewer could draw useful conclusions when reviewing someone's open-source contributions if they are minor. To examine the points of the article:

1. "Knowing how well they write code": If they aren't a chief maintainer of a project, it's not really that easy to tell which random contributions are theirs. You need some fairly large and organized example, for this to be a practical review.

2. "Knowing how to patch": I don't think the vast majority of projects have to deal with this situation. So while it is useful experience, it doesn't seem more likely that someone in the open-source world would have that experience.

3. "Passion": Again, most people aren't going to be deeply passionate about contributing 1 or 2 pages of code to a 10-year-old project that has thousands of revisions. The people who will be passionate are the ones who wrote the thing from scratch and are improving it to this day.

4. "Support": This is actually a paradoxical case, where the people merely using open-source software (and having never seen the code) may be more qualified to support software over time, than the developers. This is because developers spend their time, well, developing, and would be overwhelmed if significant time was just support. Plus, see #3, how many people would be passionate about a project that is a support burden?

5. "Saving money": This is more a reason to use open-source software, than a reason to hire any particular person because of their open-source experience.

Good observation. Its more important to use opensource software

There are really a couple or three genres of open source projects:

- Those which are basically just hobby projects that are coincidentally open source

- Those which are basically commercial projects, but coincidentally open source

- Those which are large, community oriented projects, with real open source dynamics

The first two really don't involve much additional benefit that wouldn't be picked up elsewhere, despite legally being open source work. The last of them is where you pick up the more requisite hackeryness.

"Open source developers have had to think on their toes and patch the programs that Microsoft has (often times) intentionally broken."

This is definitely true for members of the Samba team, but open source development does not necessarily involve cleaning up Microsoft's mess. It also does not necessarily involve a work ethic of any kind, good or bad.

I'd suggest hiring hardworking and quick-thinking developers; I don't think work in open source precludes laziness or dullness.

If an open source developer is defined as "one who is committed to a particular OSS project and is a regular code/review contributor" there are only two scenarios that I see where my company should hire him

1. My company stands to benefit from the evolution of said project (think red hat)

2. He is ready to move on and not contribute to the project any more. I would need his full attention to be on the project I am hiring him for.

I don't agree with the article that any random company should go and start hiring open source developers.

Though an individual may be "committed to a particular OSS project," it's hard to work on OSS in a vacuum. An open source developer is much more likely to have a broader awareness of the software landscape, especially when it comes to the F/OSS ecosystem. That knowledge can be invaluable when large tasks with tight deadlines pop up.

So as to your first point, I'd argue that the added domain knowledge would benefit your company, even if the specific project does not.

As to your second point, it seems like that policy would only allow you to hire individuals that do not practice their craft off-hours. I'm not sure how that would improve the quality of your team or its products.

All else being equal, I do believe that random companies should hire open source developers preferentially. If nothing else, the first and third bullets are quite useful: You can see real, working code before making a decision, and the commitment to a F/OSS project is a commitment to honing the developer's professional craft.

(I'd like to apologize in advance if my tone is a bit harsh, I'm not trying to be insulting.)

You'll get my full attention when you pay me for 16 hours of work, what I do in my spare time isn't for you to decide. There also aren't a whole lot of programmers to pick if you disqualify all the ones that work on side projects (open or closed), just because you can see that hes working on something else on his own time doesn't mean hes not doing his job.

But for the purposes of that article, that's not how an open source developer is defined. Maybe in his last point, but we'll get to that. For the most part, it seems like he's just talking about the benefits you get from hiring, or even considering, someone who hacks on open source projects. Problem is, the article isn't very cogent. All of his benefits are generalizations, and either obviously true or wrong:

1. You can look at their code on the internets.

2. They can reverse engineer obfuscated, changing protocols.

3. They like to code.

4. They can upgrade httpd.

5. You're ... apparently also adopting whatever project they hack on. Huh?

If I'm hiring developers, though, I probably am going to look positively on folks that hack OSS.

In my case, I have a full-time job unrelated to free software, and I dedicate substantial time outside of work to my free software.

You are wrong to assume that a developer who has programming interests outside of work, would somehow fail to give you "full attention" on the job. If anything, it shows that the developer knows how to write many different kinds of programs (a strength).

I would have though the reason is quite simple. Most companies would fall into the category of software users and as such have no desires what so ever to become developers of software.

If you’re not in the business of developing software, you won’t be needing software developers.

I was thinking about hiring a dev or several to work on OSS I use too - it can be a savings too, since if OSS you use and depend on and have vested interest in has active development it can attract more developers you are not paying for.

I'm curious about the 6% (as of this writing) who voted "No" on the poll.

Have tried to hire open source developers. Most of them are very busy and expensive. But I still ask prospective hires to see their GitHub accounts. If they don't provide a link, they are automatically disqualified.

And what if we don't have a github account? It's like disqualifying a candidate because they like the wrong sports team, or make a vodka rather than gin martini. Pure idiocy.

Not to mention just because they haven't written open source in the past doesn't preclude quality work. I'd hire someone who does DO-178B over an average open source developer any day.

The point wasn't the GitHub account, although most developers I know in the Ruby on Rails land have one and put all their open source code there. Since Rails is so GitHub centric, you can see if they forked any rails apps, what they are watching, etc.

If they had stuff on their own repositories or other sites like RubyForge, Google Code, etc. that is fine.

When someone does open source code it shows that they are passionate about programming and that they are not doing it just for a paycheck.

Reminds me or a story I read a few weeks back: http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-06-2....

Asking for profile information as part of an interview process is not popular around here; I'd suggest scrubbing your earlier posts in case a future employee decides to dig through _your_ trash.

A GitHub profile is not the same as a Myspace or Facebook account. Maybe if you had an account there you would understand.

While Github differs from the social networking sites mentioned above, your employees must be allowed to keep their after-hours, legal programming private. Requiring the submission of internet profiles is intrusive.

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