Being "employed" in a related field isn't the same thing, though. A moderately animate clothes rack can get a job as a software developer; it's just not that di

Being "employed" in a related field isn't the same thing, though. A moderately animate clothes rack can get a job as a software developer; it's just not that difficult. My assertion is that having those open source software projects is not materially impacting the careers most writers of open source software because of that software's existence (i.e., excluding potential improvements in skill and craftsmanship from writing it; you can get those through not writing open source software just the same). Even in hiring processes it's really rare to have an interviewer bother to so much as glance at your GitHub account or, like, your NPM account. I'm personally in an interesting spot, as part of why I got my current job is that I have demonstrated proficiency with various sets of tools through writing open-source software (even there it's not my open source work itself, just my understanding of the stuff I'm writing it against). But I'm also aware that I'm very much the exception on that one.