4 ms·

Recommendations for building a career in open source

64 points by jonobacon 10y ago

jondubois 10y ago
Open source is not a good career path. It's hard. Bastard hard. It took me 5 years of running open source projects before one of my projects got popular. What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders. That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source. If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have very little savings. Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own Facebook stock. Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough have any community around it at all. Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code... Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed.
- nyan4 10y ago
  Project name an URL?
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    Apparently, SocketCluster - http://socketcluster.io/ http://socketcluster.io/ https://github.com/jondubois https://github.com/jondubois
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  > Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed. This sums it up pretty well.
- jkot 10y ago
  Running popular open-source project might also make it harder to quit and find good job. Employers assume you will run that project forever, and you might not have a time for full time job.
- user5994461 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more. The words "career" and "open-source" should not go together. Unless by career, one means working for free, on unpaid projects, without [local] peers. There are few companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, RedHat, ...) that do open-source and a career there would be fine. But that's probably not what people think when they're talking about working for open source.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    The other way to "do" open-source as a career (but not really) is just to get into jobs where you're working with open-source technologies. There's lots of jobs doing Linux-based development, for instance. You might not get to release anything to the community, but at least you won't be pulling your hair out working on a proprietary platform.
- jondubois 10y ago
  If you want to get an idea for how difficult a career choice open source is: I'm currently working to monetize my open source project with https://baasil.io/ https://baasil.io/ (with some cofounders) - The surprising thing I learned is that investors do NOT care AT ALL that your OSS project has almost 20k downloads per month and that you spent 3+ years of your life on it and are fully dedicated to it. Employers care, other developers care, but to an investor, it means nothing. I applied to a startup incubator in Sydney several months ago; I showed them all my project stats (it's probably one of the most popular open source frameworks to come out of Australia). I hussled hard; I even managed to get tickets to a few investor conferences and events and, each time, I would talk to every person in the room. I ended up securing a coffee meeting with an investor (after talking to him at two different events; 3 if you count the fact that I had actually talked to the guy on the phone 2 years before about what I was planning to do; so he knew I was serious) and he recommended that I apply to an incubator in which he was a director. I applied; but I didn't even end up getting into the first round of interviews (they just didn't understand the product or the market)! They selected a bunch of other startups (some of which didn't even have a proof of concept to show). Maybe the experience would have been different in another country.
  - inputcoffee 10y ago
    I like the honesty of your answers. I think an investor would care more if it were making money, or if there was a way to make money. I think charging is a great way to demonstrate that. You could also just add a voluntary payment and see if people just send some money your way.
- ktta 10y ago
  Thanks for this insight. I have always wondered how people make money while purely working on OSS projects which generate so little revenue if any. I guess OSS is only for people who really love OSS not just think its cool.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    >I have always wondered how people make money while purely working on OSS projects which generate so little revenue if any. Basically, they don't, except for a few exceptions. Some small minority gets to do it as a full-time career because they either 1) work for a company that has an open-source business model of some kind (such as Magento, which is open-source but the code is uncommented and difficult to understand, so they sell services in customizing it for e-shop owners), or 2) work for a company or foundation that large corporations fund in order to advance open-source infrastructure (e.g. The Linux Foundation, people at Intel working on Linux drivers for Intel hardware, etc.). And maybe 3) they work in some capacity at a university and do open-source work that way. Everyone else does it for free in their spare time. And they're doing it less and less it seems; notice that FOSS's heyday was really back in the early 2000s: sourceforge, freshmeat, etc. were all hot sites back then, and there was all kinds of new open-source software coming out constantly. Now it's stagnating: the generation that was interested in this stuff has gotten old, become middle-aged, and gotten married and maybe had kids, so they don't have free time for that stuff any more. The younger generation, by and large, isn't picking up the slack (probably because the economy is shit and they're all working on their "side hustle" because they're rightfully paranoid about making enough money to maintain their standard of living in the face of ever-increasing rents).
- davidw 10y ago
  Yep. Scarcity rules: https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...
gaius 10y ago
Realistically if you want to be paid to work on open source, work for Oracle, IBM, Red Hat et al
- scholia 10y ago
  True, but it probably reduces the range of products you can work on ;-)
  - cpitman 10y ago
    At least at Red Hat, it is easy for us to have open source side projects outside of the Red Hat suite of products.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    That's not really true for SUSE (I work there), and I doubt it's true for RedHat and similar companies. As long as it doesn't impact your L3 bug squashing abilities, and it is at least tangentially related to what your team focuses on then there's no problem.
niroze 10y ago
You build a career doing a job and solving problems, using specific skill sets. Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid to work on opensource projects or projects you've worked on become opensource. I've built a career on open source technologies, mainly as a hobby that I turned into a job :)
ashitlerferad 10y ago
Some more great advice on negotiation of employment contracts for open source jobs: https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/ https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/
sytse 10y ago
Nice article from the best community expert out there. I think the natural trajectory for a developer can be something like: 1. Work on it as a hobby 2. Hobby gets a bit too serious 3. Start charging an hourly fee 4. Get hired by company sponsor or start company
maxxxxx 10y ago
It seems to me that you need to be a good writer and be an interesting speaker at conferences. Just writing open source code is probably not a good career path. At least if you want to make some money.

64 points by jonobacon 10y ago

Open source is not a good career path. It's hard. Bastard hard. It took me 5 years of running open source projects before one of my projects got popular. What did I get from this? It gave me the flexibility to work for any company I want. It allowed me to meet some big startup founders. That sounds great but I probably spent 4000 hours over 5 years on open source. If I had used that time to do extra contract work on the side, I could easily have earned $300k. I could have used the money to buy a house. Instead I have very little savings. Open source is not worth it as a career. Only do it if you love it. Don't expect it to pay. Your project can have thousands of stars on GitHub and have thousands of users but it doesn't translate to much. The average Facebook or Google employee probably gets about the same amount and quality of career opportunities as I do... If not better. But they have savings, they own Facebook stock. Career wise there is no doubt that open source is a mistake. And I'm actually one of the lucky ones... Most open source projects never get popular enough have any community around it at all. Like the author said, it's all about networking. Don't bother writing code... Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed.

nyan4 10y ago
Project name an URL?
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  Apparently, SocketCluster - http://socketcluster.io/ http://socketcluster.io/ https://github.com/jondubois https://github.com/jondubois
0xmohit 10y ago
> Just blog about other people's open source work and meet people and you will succeed. This sums it up pretty well.
jkot 10y ago
Running popular open-source project might also make it harder to quit and find good job. Employers assume you will run that project forever, and you might not have a time for full time job.
user5994461 10y ago
I couldn't agree more. The words "career" and "open-source" should not go together. Unless by career, one means working for free, on unpaid projects, without [local] peers. There are few companies (Google, Facebook, IBM, RedHat, ...) that do open-source and a career there would be fine. But that's probably not what people think when they're talking about working for open source.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  The other way to "do" open-source as a career (but not really) is just to get into jobs where you're working with open-source technologies. There's lots of jobs doing Linux-based development, for instance. You might not get to release anything to the community, but at least you won't be pulling your hair out working on a proprietary platform.
jondubois 10y ago
If you want to get an idea for how difficult a career choice open source is: I'm currently working to monetize my open source project with https://baasil.io/ https://baasil.io/ (with some cofounders) - The surprising thing I learned is that investors do NOT care AT ALL that your OSS project has almost 20k downloads per month and that you spent 3+ years of your life on it and are fully dedicated to it. Employers care, other developers care, but to an investor, it means nothing. I applied to a startup incubator in Sydney several months ago; I showed them all my project stats (it's probably one of the most popular open source frameworks to come out of Australia). I hussled hard; I even managed to get tickets to a few investor conferences and events and, each time, I would talk to every person in the room. I ended up securing a coffee meeting with an investor (after talking to him at two different events; 3 if you count the fact that I had actually talked to the guy on the phone 2 years before about what I was planning to do; so he knew I was serious) and he recommended that I apply to an incubator in which he was a director. I applied; but I didn't even end up getting into the first round of interviews (they just didn't understand the product or the market)! They selected a bunch of other startups (some of which didn't even have a proof of concept to show). Maybe the experience would have been different in another country.
- inputcoffee 10y ago
  I like the honesty of your answers. I think an investor would care more if it were making money, or if there was a way to make money. I think charging is a great way to demonstrate that. You could also just add a voluntary payment and see if people just send some money your way.
ktta 10y ago
Thanks for this insight. I have always wondered how people make money while purely working on OSS projects which generate so little revenue if any. I guess OSS is only for people who really love OSS not just think its cool.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >I have always wondered how people make money while purely working on OSS projects which generate so little revenue if any. Basically, they don't, except for a few exceptions. Some small minority gets to do it as a full-time career because they either 1) work for a company that has an open-source business model of some kind (such as Magento, which is open-source but the code is uncommented and difficult to understand, so they sell services in customizing it for e-shop owners), or 2) work for a company or foundation that large corporations fund in order to advance open-source infrastructure (e.g. The Linux Foundation, people at Intel working on Linux drivers for Intel hardware, etc.). And maybe 3) they work in some capacity at a university and do open-source work that way. Everyone else does it for free in their spare time. And they're doing it less and less it seems; notice that FOSS's heyday was really back in the early 2000s: sourceforge, freshmeat, etc. were all hot sites back then, and there was all kinds of new open-source software coming out constantly. Now it's stagnating: the generation that was interested in this stuff has gotten old, become middle-aged, and gotten married and maybe had kids, so they don't have free time for that stuff any more. The younger generation, by and large, isn't picking up the slack (probably because the economy is shit and they're all working on their "side hustle" because they're rightfully paranoid about making enough money to maintain their standard of living in the face of ever-increasing rents).
davidw 10y ago
Yep. Scarcity rules: https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...

gaius 10y ago

Realistically if you want to be paid to work on open source, work for Oracle, IBM, Red Hat et al

scholia 10y ago
True, but it probably reduces the range of products you can work on ;-)
- cpitman 10y ago
  At least at Red Hat, it is easy for us to have open source side projects outside of the Red Hat suite of products.
- cyphar 10y ago
  That's not really true for SUSE (I work there), and I doubt it's true for RedHat and similar companies. As long as it doesn't impact your L3 bug squashing abilities, and it is at least tangentially related to what your team focuses on then there's no problem.

niroze 10y ago

You build a career doing a job and solving problems, using specific skill sets. Sometimes you're lucky enough to get paid to work on opensource projects or projects you've worked on become opensource. I've built a career on open source technologies, mainly as a hobby that I turned into a job :)

ashitlerferad 10y ago

Some more great advice on negotiation of employment contracts for open source jobs: https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/ https://lwn.net/Articles/688451/

sytse 10y ago

Nice article from the best community expert out there. I think the natural trajectory for a developer can be something like: 1. Work on it as a hobby 2. Hobby gets a bit too serious 3. Start charging an hourly fee 4. Get hired by company sponsor or start company

maxxxxx 10y ago

It seems to me that you need to be a good writer and be an interesting speaker at conferences. Just writing open source code is probably not a good career path. At least if you want to make some money.