Have you ever been hired because of some open-source contribution? Or do you know someone who was?
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.
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
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..
BTW: there are jobs working on open source, some resources:
https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And from my side, I think it's great for juniors engineers to be a part of some open-source
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.
1. https://github.com/extfuse/extfuse optimizes FUSE with eBPF