Slashdot Log In
Open Source Helps New IT Grads Get Foot in the Door
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Aug 10, 2008 09:19 AM
from the ocasional-bright-spot dept.
from the ocasional-bright-spot dept.
Yes, some US IT jobs are disappearing, but Linux.com (which shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has a recent story emphasizing the job advantage that involvement in open source projects can give young programmers who aren't planning to ditch their dreams of making a living in the field. The article focuses on one programmer's experience with Google's Summer of Code, which led directly to her job working on the Drupal content-management system. But the underlying message (that involvement in open source projects provides a background of experience otherwise difficult to obtain because of the chicken-and-egg problem of "experience required" job opportunities) is generalizable to many other forms of open-source involvement. Do you have a job that you landed because of your unpaid open-source programming?
Related Stories
[+]
News: Nearly 50,000 IT Jobs Lost In Past Year 460 comments
snydeq writes "Employment statistics from the US Department of Labor show what most IT people have already realized: IT jobs are getting harder to come by. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 13,000 jobs in the information industry were cut in July, bringing the total to 44,000 year over year. An additional 5,000 jobs were lost in telecom this past month. The statistics reinforce a recent survey of top CIOs who indicated that they will be reducing their IT staff over the coming year. According to a staffing research firm, some jobs have gone to outsourcers, while other jobs are simply going away, either due to cost-oriented automation efforts or due to increasing the remaining staff's workload."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
But how does it help non programmers and PHB who s (Score:4, Interesting)
But how does it help non programmers and PHB who say they want job experience in a office not side / school work?
Re:But how does it help non programmers and PHB wh (Score:5, Insightful)
only if the office PHB is not a moron.
If the PHB discounts your OSS work, you REALLY DO NOT want to work there.
Consider it a "has a clue" flag in the database. If they dont like the OSS work, the OSS flag is not set and you should exclude that place from your dataset.
Parent
What about PHB in HR as well the other HR people (Score:2)
What about PHB in HR as well the other HR people.
We want you to have real job experience and you don't get past them and to the real IT people who like work like that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. For my last promotion HR didn't consider me "qualified enough" even though my boss assured them that I was more than capable of taking on the increased responsibilities. In the end the job posting had to be retracted, and the job description/requirements rewritten in order to fit my paper credentials more closely.
Now, this was for an existing employee (me) that was already known to the people who would do the final hiring. If you were some unknown applicant out of college however, you'd get tosse
Re: (Score:2)
Unfortunately there are a lot of places where that kind of reasoning is applied by almost all HR drones and hiring managers. That's the reason for me going back to school to take a couple of "mickey mouse" courses, to be able to put stuff like "basic linux administration skills" on my resumé without having every company I apply for a job with dismiss me as "another loser who downloaded and installed Ubuntu and now thinks he's God's gift to UNIX administration" even though I state quite clearly that I h
Re:But how does it help non programmers and PHB wh (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the reason for me going back to school to take a couple of "mickey mouse" courses, to be able to put stuff like "basic linux administration skills" on my resumé without having every company I apply for a job with dismiss me as "another loser who downloaded and installed Ubuntu and now thinks he's God's gift to UNIX administration" even though I state quite clearly that I have used various UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems since 1997.
Unfortunately, it is common practice to stretch your skills a LOT on a resume. You just can't put your real skillset down, you have to put every skill that could possibly pertain to the job, and any and everything that shows leadership and the ability to manage (HR and managers relate to those skills so it puts you in the limelight). The point of the resume is to get you the interview, the interview is where you should be able to discuss how wonderful you are and how you've worked on project X and designed system Y. I'm not saying to lie, but there is no shame in claiming "advanced linux administration experience" by administering your own server/firewall and making it sound like it was really a professional grade job.
Anyway, any place that looks at those certifications is likely to eat up anything you tell them anyway, because they usually don't know any better. A place where they ask you technical questions usually won't care where you learned the stuff, as long as you know your shit. I prefer the later type of setting myself.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, any place that looks at those certifications is likely to eat up anything you tell them anyway, because they usually don't know any better. A place where they ask you technical questions usually won't care where you learned the stuff, as long as you know your shit. I prefer the later type of setting myself.
Well, it's not that these courses are useless, it's just that most of the stuff in them is stuff I knew how to do back in the late 90's (and which are apparently considered advanced UNIX skills these days, like building apache+mysql+php on your own instead of running Synaptic and clicking on Apache, MySQL and PHP followed by the "install selected packages" button). So I'm basically taking these courses so that potential employers will know I'm not lying about my skills.
/Mikael
Re:But how does it help non programmers and PHB wh (Score:4, Interesting)
"only if the office PHB is not a moron."
Not really. I see lots of open source contribution as more likely to leak commercial code into open source projects.
Also, with the FSF going after all of these companies in court over GPL violations, why would I want to take a risk on a programmer that might "accidentally" add GPLd code in our codebase and risk the entire company's IP.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
PHP: - Sorry, OSS work does not count, besides I have never heard of that project. Have you done any real work in your life? ...
Linus: -
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
These skills then easily transferable to the other Unix OSs such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc. which you're unlikely to ever touch unless you're paid to do so.
Sounds like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like its not so much open source involvement, but generally ANY involvement with your field, helps. And thats true for any job, any field, anything. In IT, you could simply do unpaid internships and get similar results. Its just a bit easier to get involved in open source, because you can jump in a project just by writing patches and open they get accepted, and go from there...
But really, any field. Doing some volunteer work has always helped landing a job, its nothing new.
Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
That's besides the point (Score:3, Insightful)
Newsflash! (Score:5, Funny)
Details at 11!
Re:Newsflash! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It may not be "legal", but it still seems to be a thriving business within the city limits. Go figure.
p.s. Pahrump is northwest of Las Vegas...
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't work for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been working on my open source project [sf.net] for three years and that doesn't help me a bit when looking for a job in Dublin (Ireland, not Ohio). Basically there's a very few jobs out there in which you can program in C or anything vaguely signal processing-related and they all want you to have at least three years of commercial experience, don't care if you've got the snazziest open source project out there.
And I've been looking for a job for over 5 months now, and mainly in tech support and system administration because really, no one wants to hire me for a coding job.
Re:Doesn't work for me (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe you should get off your ARSS and try working for a different open source project?
*pa-da-pshhh!* [instantrimshot.com] ;-)
Re:Doesn't work for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been working on my open source project [dal.net] for about ten years now, and it has played a major role in every single job that I've held.
I got my present job through someone I worked on the project with. I've been there 4.5 years.
I also got involved in a local unix users group by way of hearing about it from some friends of the open source project. The connections I made at that users group have gotten me the job I will be starting in one month.
My open source project, however idle it has been for the last several years, has contributed significantly and directly to my career.
And I've been looking for a job for over 5 months now, and mainly in tech support and system administration because really, no one wants to hire me for a coding job.
Get used to it. Unless you want to crank out business rules written in Java, systems administration/engineering/architecture is the place to be, IMHO. In those teams you can actually do work in C, mess around inside the kernel, and actually make use of all your skills. "Programmers" these days actually seem pretty boring unless you're working for a tech company that has an exceptional software engineering department doing something interesting.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You have the answer right there in black and white - and it's not the answer you thought it was ...
I got my present job through someone ... ...
The connections I made at that users group have gotten me the job
Sitting at home haxoring F/OSS in your underware isn't going to help anyone's long term career.
Interacting with other people, contributing to a common goal in a collaborative fashion where you establish yourself in the minds of influential people as someone that delivers quality work - THIS is what open
Re:Doesn't work for me (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you are doing it wrong, marketing yourself wrong.
I trot out my OSS projects not as "I work on this free thing on the side" but as "I invented and designed product X, I am a volunteer lead developer for Project Y, and I saved project Z and single handed brought it from a failure to a viable product.
You need to take marketing classes, you gotta market yourself and network hard with people in the field. Hell get an article published in Dr Dobbs or another programming rag and your value goes up even farther.
You market yourself as a one trick pony. you gotta have a list of tricks to dazzle them.
Parent
Re:Doesn't work for me (Score:4, Interesting)
Lumpy is correct, and that goes for everything, every job, open source, close source, non-software job, everything. All job market experts and professional resume writers will confirm it, too.
When you write your resume (or talk during an interview), you don't say "I worked on XYZ". No one gives a flying duck about what you worked on, because there's at least 10000 people who worked on the same thing, no matter how niche. What people care (and not only dumb ass PHBs and HR), is your achievements. The net gain you provided, the "out of the ordinary" stuff that pushes you ahead of others.
So that line : "and I saved project Z and single handed brought it from a failure to a viable product" is the most important one of the bunch, and thats a sure fire job lander.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you have been working for 3 years on the project, but hasn't managed to get it into a first version yet? No wonder you can't get a job if you can't show ability to get stuff out the door.
Also, ARSS? In the beginning you called it ARSE - Yes that might be tong in cheek and kind of fun, but for a company hiring it doesn't exactly signal maturity.
Remember you are pointing them to this project saying "this is what I can do!" and when they go there you show them that you are a lazy guy who doesn't get his thi
Re: (Score:2)
So you have been working for 3 years on the project, but hasn't managed to get it into a first version yet? No wonder you can't get a job if you can't show ability to get stuff out the door.
What the hell are you drivelling about? That's like saying that the eMule project "hasn't managed to get it into a first version yet". Just because the version number starts with a 0. Ridiculous. As for the project name, when you try to think of an acronym for it you can only come up with A's and S's. And anything that wasn't an acronym sucked.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then don't use the acronym, name it! If the name is too long, then rename it to something shorter and easier to remember.
And just because someone else hasn't released "full" version doesn't make it right. You are the one searching for a job, what count is peoples view of your project(s).
And don't get jumpy about it, I work for an IT company and we do hire C/C++ programmers, and I am one of those sitting across the table. I checked out your site and my response is the same as if you would have applied where
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well thank you for your insight, I appreciate. I'm glad to know that there are people out there in charge of recruiting me who would dismiss my work based on the fact that its version number starts with a 0, like it's more important than what it actually does?
No offense but I think I'll keep it like this, sounds like a good way to weed out people who need a clue ;-)
Re:Doesn't work for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to say it, but that's a pretty arcane bit of coding you've done there. Having taken a sound processing class at university, I'd probably hire you on the spot if the damn thing works like you say it does. Purely on the "If he can figure out how to do this on his own, he'll probably figure out whatever I set him" theory. On the other hand, a lot of people are going to look at this like it's an impractical exercise outside of a few very specific applications.
You might try volunteering some time on a larger project with a more understandable goal. This gives you a) practical experience working with a team (usually pretty important in development work), b) something that an average manager will understand when you show them what you did, and c) a potential reference from someone else in the team who is already in industry and thus has standing to recommend you.
Your personal project has two thing working against it as useful "experience". First, few people are going to really understand what you did, or how difficult it was. Second, you're not actually getting what they would consider useful professional experience. "Real" projects are developed by teams, with schedules, check-ins and outs, a team leader that everyone else reports to, and some sort of hierarchical development plan. This is often more than half of what companies want to see when they ask for "experience". They assume people learned how to pound code into an IDE in in university, they want to see that you can fit into a dev team and do your part.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Bad me for replying to my own comment, but I've just read you response to someone else and this occurred to me. Have you considered going back for an advanced degree and getting a research job? Guys at universities and national labs (at least here in the US) get to work on esoteric stuff like this all day.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I'm speaking from an exclusively US based perspective here, so don't quote me, YMMV, etc.
Usually to do research at a university you have to have a PhD. You get your PhD, spend a few years (anywhere from 4-8 depending on job availability and your own record of accomplishments) working for someone else as a "Post-Doc" helping with their research, and then you can get a junior faculty position somewhere and start doing your own research.
You can also find jobs doing pure research type CS stuff at the big
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no ticket to a free job. If you can't sell yourself, it doesn't matter how great your experience is. But even if you're the greatest self-promoter in the world, you still have to bust your ass for that job. That's life.
Worked for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I was working for my university as a student in the IT department and implementing an open-source portal. Ended up getting a job offer with a company that provided consulting for said project. Now that I'm four years into working with the project and on my second employer (voluntary change) having open-source project experience while in college and after opens a lot of doors. Beyond just the development experience if you become heavily involved in a project it can also speak volumes about your interpersonal and team skills.
Unsure in Seattle (Score:5, Funny)
Do you have a job that you landed because of you unpaid open-source programming?
I lost my last job for using the dead compile times for working on my pet open source project. Then I found another job, so you can say I landed there because of my unpaid open-source programming. Does that count?
My IT experience (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
A little... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Working with Linux helped me get my first job (Score:5, Interesting)
I got my degree in Physics, but my career path after that was in IT. My first job (January, 1995) was working as a UNIX systems administrator at a small geographics company. What helped me land the job despite having a different educational background was first-hand "experience" with Linux (SLS and Slackware.) I was the first at my university to try Linux (1993) so I became a sort of go-to guy for Linux questions when the CompSci students started to install it, and the university IT staff put it up on a few systems to try it out. "Something break? Happened to me too once, let me help you fix it."
When I graduated, and it was time to look for a job, a friend recommended me for the UNIX sysadmin job at her company. The fact that I'd had two years experience working with Linux, helping others to install it and get it working for them, really gave me a boost during the interview. I got the job.
Yes, this could have turned out the same if I'd just been helping at the computer labs (which I didn't, but others might have.) I think what gave me the extra edge was spending so much time with it at home, so when the technical interview questions came up, I was able to answer them very well. Nothing beats spending that extra time on your own desktop system, when you'll eventually mess something up and have to learn stuff on your own to get it working again and know how not break it a second time. That kind of "experience" says a lot to a hiring manager.
Worked for me (Score:5, Interesting)
First "real" tech job I interviewed for had a job description focused around porting and packaging software -- two things I'd already been doing for fun (building RPMs for whatever the current Red Hat was at the time, and porting software to my university's Solaris and IRIX boxes); the CTO (well, it was less than a 20-person shop at the time) was floored by my level of relevant experience.
I landed the interview in the first place through some folks I met helping out at the university LUG. So yes -- of course -- open source experience helps. That employer was an embedded Linux shop, and learning from some of the other folks they had on staff (a bunch of kernel developers, including two of Linus's lieutenants, a gdb maintainer, and a bunch of other really bright folks) is what I credit for getting my career off in the right direction; every job I've held since then has included some level of interaction with the open source community, and I've had a great deal of fun.
Its all about networking and communication (Score:2, Insightful)
I created a business with my open source work (Score:5, Interesting)
I built a business with unpaid open source programming. I say unpaid, because even though I was working as a consultant, the paid hours were very few and far between. I worked thousand upon thousands of hours over a period of years building a software package that sustains me to this day, almost thirteen years later.
At the time I did it though, there was a dearth of open source software. The space I chose, the electronic shopping cart, was wide open, and people were crying for anything that worked and was supported.
That is the key -- support. Decent programming and software is a must, but it doesn't need to be knock-your-socks-off great. If you can demonstrate you will be reliably there, month after month, year after year, I believe you be able to do what I did.
However, I don't think it has much to do with "50,000 IT jobs lost". What I described takes hard work and initiative, as does any substantive contribution to an open source software package. The people demonstrating that type of ability are not the ones who are marginalized.
Open Source Project Helped (Score:2)
When I interviewed for the developer job I've now held for the last seven years, the clincher was all of the Open Source projects I had written up to that point; particularly my Yahoo group chat client (RiffRaff, which has long since become obsolete). Good interview skills helped, but the long list of useful (at least to me) Open Source software I had created was what impressed the interviewers the most.
The general impression I made was that if I needed something, I didn't wait around for someone else to h
What about Linus? (Score:4, Interesting)
Open Source didn't really help him land a job for what 9 years?
Experience (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of you younglings may think experience is overrated, that your degree from a party university should give you a free entry into an immediately high paying job. But this is the real world. Degrees are a dime a dozen and most resumes are padded. You need to prove to us old fogeys not just that you can code, but that you can code well, know how to design, now how to work in teams, won't go on a three month drinking binge the first time you get a bug logged against your software.
We want experience!
That's what internships are for. But getting an internship is almost as difficult as getting a regular position. Open Source Software lets you create your own internship. It lets you put down real experience on your resume. Even if you have real world experience, a lot of your code won't be public. But your Open Source Software will be, and interviewers can see your actual code.
Why I'm skeptical about the career value (Score:4, Interesting)
I happen to be a F/OSS advocate. But, I'm a little skeptical about the career value of volunteering your time for F/OSS projects. The problems, as I see it, are:
1) Most employers want five years of recent, verifiable, full-time, professional experience. That would be an awful lot of time to volunteer.
2) Offshore, and guest workers are still much cheaper. Maybe it's best for Americans to give up on software development, and let the offshore workers have it.
3) Even if an American can manage to get a development job, salaries are going down the toilet, as the market becomes glutted.
Both presidential candidates, and almost all of congress, are pushing for more guest workers. Bill Gates is petitioning for unlimited guest workers. Once the election is over, I think guest worker caps will be raised substantially, if not eliminated entirely.
Visibility and community... (Score:2)
...are a big part of it. If you develop some software, and get it out there where people can try it, and comment on it, and you can react to those comments, it says a great deal about the skill set you possess. Generally speaking, open source is going to be the quickest way to accomplish this.
Our CS students seem to understand this innately - many of them develop open source projects - small, relatively specialized ones that are appropriate to to some of the specialties that exist in our department. To s