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There are two sides of the coin here, which should not be opposed in my opinion. I've done a fair bit of recruiting for clients willing to build technical team

There are two sides of the coin here, which should not be opposed in my opinion. I've done a fair bit of recruiting for clients willing to build technical teams (developers / data engineers / data scientists): my experience is similar to yours in that the large majority of the technical candidates I've been interviewing have no visible trace on GitHub (either because they worked on closed source, or because they are out of school without not a lot of personal drive to work on OSS). But at the same time, as a freelance consultant for the last 10 years, having work online available for everyone to see or use (OSS or other) has driven a lot of valuable leads to me (e.g. on my niche doing Ruby ETL http://www.kiba-etl.org/ http://www.kiba-etl.org/). Last note is I agree with the premise of the article that we are shifting away from "week-end contributors". For me OSS is something I work during the day, even as a single-man shop, and something that is (if properly managed) bringing in a sizeable part of my income.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
> the large majority of the technical candidates I've been interviewing have no visible trace on GitHub (either because they worked on closed source, or because they are out of school without not a lot of personal drive to work on OSS). Or because they work extensively on OSS projects that don't use GitHub.
- thibaut_barrere 10y ago
  Actually no (not in my case, I mean! YMMV). Something I can tell with certainty is that in my recruitement channels for the last 2 years, people either do OSS on GitHub, or are not doing OSS at all.
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    That might be true in your recruitment channels, but in general it's a problematic assumption. Many prominent Open Source projects don't use GitHub; in particular, that applies to those large enough and/or old enough to have and maintain their own infrastructure. I've run into that problematic assumption a few times, and it seems worth calling attention to.
    - glandium 10y ago
      However, many prominent Open Source projects that don't use GitHub have mirrors on GitHub, and as long as you star them, they appear in your GitHub profile if you contributed to them using an email that is registered to your GitHub account. To give examples: - Git https://github.com/git/git https://github.com/git/git, - Linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux, - LibreOffice https://github.com/LibreOffice/core https://github.com/LibreOffice/core, - Firefox https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev

JoshTriplett 10y ago

> the large majority of the technical candidates I've been interviewing have no visible trace on GitHub (either because they worked on closed source, or because they are out of school without not a lot of personal drive to work on OSS). Or because they work extensively on OSS projects that don't use GitHub.

thibaut_barrere 10y ago
Actually no (not in my case, I mean! YMMV). Something I can tell with certainty is that in my recruitement channels for the last 2 years, people either do OSS on GitHub, or are not doing OSS at all.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  That might be true in your recruitment channels, but in general it's a problematic assumption. Many prominent Open Source projects don't use GitHub; in particular, that applies to those large enough and/or old enough to have and maintain their own infrastructure. I've run into that problematic assumption a few times, and it seems worth calling attention to.
  - glandium 10y ago
    However, many prominent Open Source projects that don't use GitHub have mirrors on GitHub, and as long as you star them, they appear in your GitHub profile if you contributed to them using an email that is registered to your GitHub account. To give examples: - Git https://github.com/git/git https://github.com/git/git, - Linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux, - LibreOffice https://github.com/LibreOffice/core https://github.com/LibreOffice/core, - Firefox https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev