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If only this were true. I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work in a way that indicates they clicked through the links in my resume and read the well formatted READMEs on the projects I maintain. When I do interviews, the rubrics I’m supposed to work towards don’t have any way to include an assessment of open source work, and other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work. The general sentiment seems to be that evaluating open source work is unfair to people who’ve done their work in corporate environments. I’m sure there are some hiring managers in some companies who can and do use it as a signal, but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill. It’s not terrible advice because it can’t hurt, it’s just not the magic foot in the door some people hope it would be. There’s no magic key if you’re early career, especially these days. I feel bad for the youngsters.
Your networking advice sounds good, but I find it exhausting and I know a lot of great hackers do to (not claiming to be one of them). Building your personal brand is probably great for your career, but I want to write code, not win instagram to get a job. Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.
These sound like companies that will fail
The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.
Sounds like you should change careers.
I'm being pretty harsh on purpose.
"The job market isn't what I want it to be." Correct. You can either adapt to it or try something else. Complaining alone gets a person nowhere. It's an old redpill quote, so take it for what it's worth, but the saying goes "Life never gets easier, but you can get better."
Technical hiring has been fucked in one form or another since the easy money days of 08 - 16 (roughly). The people who succeed are the people who don't follow the herd and make an effort. If all you want is to resume spam that's fine - expect resume spam level results.
If you, instead, build a network, build a brand (also - who said anything about Instagram? Some of the biggest voices in tech still run their own personal text heavy blogs. Gwern comes to mind). If you don't want to do either of those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
All have been well established and successful to varying degrees. I’ve observed this pattern at FAANG, at unicorns, at established enterprise shops, basically everywhere. The only place that seemed to engage with my open source work was a very early stage startup, so maybe it helps there but for the vast majority of tech jobs it just doesn’t matter.
Just write a virially successful project with enormous buzz bro. It’s a totally viable career path for average devs to become the Twitter main character for a week and land a job!
Obviously this will work for some people, but that doesn’t mean it will for most.
I’ll hang onto the gig where I get overpaid to write fun little programs until it gets automated away, thanks though. I was talking about barely having the energy to do extra unpaid work for fun on open source stuff. That I do it at all means I’m in the top few percent of professional devs passion wise. Open source work is not normal, and if you think it is you must be way out of touch with most of the industry.
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