How to Land a Job Using Open Source

The way job recruitment works has changed. Your skills are far more valuable than your degrees. During an , Laszlo Block, former VP of People Operations at Google, stated that the proportion of Google employees without any college education had steadily increased through the years. interview for The New York Times Employers are now focused on , and not which graduation he went to. To measure the fit of applicants, recruiters are looking mainly to: what the candidate is able to do Problem solving skills Variety of backgrounds and industries Experience The recruiter needs to know whether you’ve got relevant expertise with the skill set reported on the job description or not. Let’s suppose that you currently are a Java developer wanting to work with a Microsoft stack. You’ve taken some courses and maybe got a certification in the C# language. But now you have to prove experience, and . only courses and certifications can’t do it Fortunately, there are some ways to have a stand out profile that can get you hired without having actual work experience with a specific tech stack. According to , contributing to you can take advantage of right now. Here a few tips on how to use open source as a powerful job hunting tool: GitLab open source is the most effective job-seeking hack Contribute to an open source project By contributing to open source, you will get the opportunity to work with , with stabilized projects. The open source contribution environment is diverse, you will show to the recruiter that you can work in . Also, by contributing, you are going to help with , by solving conflicts, prioritizing work, organizing teams, and much more. That is valuable to an employer. production code multicultural teams project and people management The leading open source contribution website is . If you still don’t have an account there, there is a lot you’re missing out. Find a project that you engage with, and start contributing. There are lots of repositories looking for maintainers: GitHub , the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser Mozilla , the cross-platform desktop apps framework (C++) Electron , a Ruby microframework for the web (Ruby) Sinatra , a web interface for MySQL and MariaDB (Java) phpMyAdmin , one of the most powerful search engines (PHP) ElasticSearch , the future of Vim NeoVim Company-targeted contribution If you are targeting to land a job at Google, for instance, you could contribute to . When you start contributing, you’ll , the way they work and the stories behind it. That will really set you apart from the other candidates, because it , earning lots of extra points with the interviewer. Google projects on GitHub grasp knowledge of the product lowers your onboarding time Large-scale projects contribution If you want to land an interview in a big company, they might need you to have past experience with projects. If you actually don’t have experience with it, you could that you can benefit from. There are a lot of large-scale projects needing help, such as: large-scale and high-availability pick a big open source project , an open-source Slack Rocket.Chat , a Python web-framework Django , the web-application framework for Ruby Ruby on Rails Build a side project Photo by on Rick Mason Unsplash By nature, we, software developers, are curious people. Whether you want to build a new JavaScript framework, a coffee machine with Arduino or a new startup: ! But don’t forget to make it open source. Technical recruiters will be able to . build it check your project, your coding style, and the decisions you have taken in your side job During an interview, the difference between and is clear. This will help you to show you can , and that you know the tools you’re using. “With Python and sklearn, I’ve built a machine learning model predicts rental houses prices in my neighborhood” “I’ve been studying machine learning for X months” build things from the ground up Build a personal brand When you start contributing to open source, you will build an online reputation. When employers see you are an active member of the community, . And that is why employee referral is still a thing. that adds trust Also, having online presence on can also help you to land that job. That shows you care for the community and are other developers. StackOverflow willing to help Mention open source during the interview When you’re changing your tech stack, it’s common to recruiters to ask you why. Not that the technology you use is that important, but to understand this specific language if you have never worked with it before. how have you learned This is where open source contributions step in. You don’t need actual work experience to prove you know C# or the language you want to work with if have contributed using it before. that there is so much talent to be had if people are open to finding this talent in different places. That means it doesn’t matter if you learned by a university, by an online course, or by contributing to open source software. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, said What matters is whether you have the skill or not. Next steps Open source contribution has become more and more accessible to everyone, from padawan to Jedi. It’s time for you to give back to the community using the force your skills. , if you haven’t Create a GitHub account so you can help or Choose a project create your own Have your first pull request merged and hooray!