How to Build Career in open Source – Guide
Join an open source project and dive diligently. This is perhaps the most important activity you can do to understand free software. Just like you need to hang out with native speakers to learn a language – no amount of vocabulary or grammar study will make you feel that way – so you need to make free software a part of your life to succeed professionally. Which project should you participate? If you use a certain free software, it goes without saying that you follow the community that maintains it. You can also search for projects that achieve social goals that are important to you. If a project is small and has only a few community members, their participation can provide renewed energy. If the project is large, you can learn a lot by participating in it. In a community, you learn about the concepts and memes that people cite as they discuss the software, its goals, and the challenges they face. You can interact with people from all over the world and learn how to build positive relationships across borders and cultures. You learn what to say and what not to say.
Assessment of technical expertise
There’s a famous story about Elon Musk, who sold a game he made as a teenager for about $500. and that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison were known for selling software to their corporate customers that they hadn’t finished building. A common theme among these titans is a deep understanding of the technology they sold to earn their millions. Back then, speaking authoritatively about the technical details of your product offerings was enough to pique the interest of consumers and investors. Today, with the technology learning curve not being that steep, the game has changed. Demonstrations of work are now a requirement; and slides are often not enough. Demonstrating knowledge is even more difficult for individuals today as concrete evidence of their talents is needed. In a market where millions have ideas, thousands actively pursue them, and hundreds have the networks that can get an audience with the best agencies, without concrete proof of concept, it becomes incredibly difficult to extract substance from the crowd. The same analogy applies to recruitment, which appears to have undergone a massive paradigm shift towards a structured process of elimination, particularly the mass recruitment of talent.
How has recruiting changed?
From having a cousin’s friend recommend your uncle’s company to being contacted by a recruiter on a messaging platform for a keyword research of your technical skills, we’ve come a long way using technology in recruiting. The process has changed significantly over the years and currently provides extremely concrete reports on a candidate’s performance at each rung of the ladder. There are now tools and resources that allow you to not only practice the same problems candidates may have been asked before, but also be interviewed by the same people during mock sessions – for a fee, of course! There are a variety of problem statements with detailed solutions that allow you to gain valuable insights into the interview process of specific companies. The availability of all these resources led to an interesting dynamic, namely the technical interview. More recently, attempts have been made to make the interview a more holistic assessment through home questions and subjective discussion of questions, as opposed to more objective questioning patterns. But the purpose of all these processes, identifying a specific candidate from hundreds of thousands of candidates for a recruiter, remains a challenge. Step into open source, a complete solution for making high-level decisions when evaluating technical knowledge.
How does open source relate to employment?
Demand for developers is high, but luckily (or unfortunately for job seekers), so is supply. This is especially true for entry-level developer roles because of bootcamps, online courses, and access to resources that allow a non-technical user to gain technical knowledge and become an active programmer. The problem for recruiters is finding candidates who can truly handle the scale, variety, and speed at which teams work to successfully fill open positions at large corporations and growing startups. The key for candidates is to demonstrate competence by successfully completing projects similar to what the hiring company is looking for. This makes it much easier to assess their work and see if they fit a role, possibly a larger project and organization. The candidate’s experience may not be all that relevant and the project may not be that big, but this approach is still preferred over blindly selecting candidates with no previous experience in the field. What the open source experience brings is the idea that a candidate knows what it’s like to choose an idea, work towards it, implement it with a programming language, fix bugs, document the code, make the work reproducible and extensible. and work as a team. This is of tremendous importance as each of these skills is valued in the industry. It’s incredibly difficult to find candidates who tick all these boxes; Recruiters always have to make compromises. This inherent value to candidates actively working on open source projects is why GitHub is such a valuable resource for recruiters. Of course, there are arguments against giving too much importance to open source profiles, but let’s refrain from doing so for now as it would be too broad for us.
Final note
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