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One tried and true method is just to schelp your skills to some employer. Open source hacking is usually evidence enough to get you a good job. Sometimes, the p

One tried and true method is just to schelp your skills to some employer. Open source hacking is usually evidence enough to get you a good job. Sometimes, the project is even strategically important to the company -- Linux and Transmeta, for example. There are a lot of very sane reasons to participate in FOSS, even if you only cared about money. It helps in getting hired. It's terrific technical practice. It builds a large set of technical links not tied to any particular employer, whom you can count on for good advice. It keeps you at the cutting edge of good practices and new technologies. And if you're starting a startup, you can find great developers through it. You can gain major hacker and media cred by open sourcing things. In fact, open source may be one of the only methods, besides hacking with people in college or at work, for finding good cofounders. This is only a hunch, but it's one I'm betting on. The only thing is that you can't immediately make money by that one particular method, but usually it takes a lot of experimentation to find a good business model anyway, and the network effects and the trouble of hosting things is often enough to keep competitors at bay.

SwellJoe 18y ago
We only hire people who have Open Source code we can spend some time with. How else are we going to know they're worth a damn? I don't have faith in my interview abilities to suss out the good ones (and Yegge's articles on the subject make me even less confident in that area). But, I can look at a developers past achievements and know whether they can produce good code fast. Then again, my co-founder and I have both been Open Source developers for at least a decade, and consider it the "normal" way to build software. And it's definitely good for your employment possibilities...I've turned down several quite awesome jobs and recruitment attempts over the years (I turned them down because I don't enjoy working for others, generally, not because they weren't very fine jobs with very fine companies). Google among them (my co-founder was unable to resist the allure of Google).
yariv 18y ago
Everything you said is true by my experience being involved in open source projects. Another reason to do open source: it gives you a better chance of being able to work on something you enjoy because it connects you with like-minded people in the industry. I think every programmer should be involved in some open source project. In most cases, a resume doesn't tell you much about someone's coding skills and real contributions, and technical interviews have many flaws in determining someone's qualifications. Only by looking at someone's code can you actually get a sense of their abilities. It's much more interesting to interview someone who has done open source projects. You don't need to waste time figuring out if he or she can reverse a linked list. You can dive straight into more advanced topics. I'm not sure about finding a cofounder though. I wouldn't feel comfortable partnering with someone if I hadn't gotten to know them by working closely with them.

SwellJoe 18y ago

We only hire people who have Open Source code we can spend some time with. How else are we going to know they're worth a damn? I don't have faith in my interview abilities to suss out the good ones (and Yegge's articles on the subject make me even less confident in that area). But, I can look at a developers past achievements and know whether they can produce good code fast. Then again, my co-founder and I have both been Open Source developers for at least a decade, and consider it the "normal" way to build software. And it's definitely good for your employment possibilities...I've turned down several quite awesome jobs and recruitment attempts over the years (I turned them down because I don't enjoy working for others, generally, not because they weren't very fine jobs with very fine companies). Google among them (my co-founder was unable to resist the allure of Google).

yariv 18y ago

Everything you said is true by my experience being involved in open source projects. Another reason to do open source: it gives you a better chance of being able to work on something you enjoy because it connects you with like-minded people in the industry. I think every programmer should be involved in some open source project. In most cases, a resume doesn't tell you much about someone's coding skills and real contributions, and technical interviews have many flaws in determining someone's qualifications. Only by looking at someone's code can you actually get a sense of their abilities. It's much more interesting to interview someone who has done open source projects. You don't need to waste time figuring out if he or she can reverse a linked list. You can dive straight into more advanced topics. I'm not sure about finding a cofounder though. I wouldn't feel comfortable partnering with someone if I hadn't gotten to know them by working closely with them.