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I recently interviewed at a Fortune 100 company's new "Innovation" group. I pointed them to the various projects I have on Github as examples of my work. They r

I recently interviewed at a Fortune 100 company's new "Innovation" group. I pointed them to the various projects I have on Github as examples of my work. They reviewed it and liked what they saw. However, my interviewer told me "we've seen your code on Github. It's great, but just so you know, you won't be able to keep that up if you work here." I asked more about what he meant by this and he told me that the company is extremely secretive and would not allow me to post any code to Github. Some other developers had already been told to take down some (very general, non-proprietary) code they had posted to Github. What came out is that my public work on Github helped me get an offer but I wasn't going to be able to contribute any new code during my years at this company. I certainly don't want a three-year blank spot in my public code "resume", so I turned down the offer. This is a bit of the tangent from the OP's point, but I think its related: Companies need to realize that the benefit of allowing employees to contribute to open-source isn't merely getting the community to work or review your team's code, but rather, open-source is a marketing and recruiting tool. Say you let your employees create and maintain open-source software. Say it is successful and other people start using that software. If it used widely enough, your employees are asked to speak at meetups and conferences and say "Look at this great software I built while working at company X. Company X is so cool, come work here!" (and every contributor to the project becomes a potential employee who will already know a portion of your code.) tl;dr - Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting.

kenjackson 15y ago
Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting. Apple barely lets their employees blog even, and last I checked they're doing OK by all counts. Unfortunately, the intersection for people who are passionate about their 9to5 work and those that are passionate about their side-project seems to actually be fairly small.
- jashmenn 15y ago
  So I agree with you in the case of Apple. But let's dissect for a minute why this is the case. Apple can be incredibly secretive and still hire with no problems because 1) they are literally creating world-changing products and people want to be involved with that 2) they have a reputation for hiring extremely bright people. If you take a job at Apple you will interact with them (/ be one of them) But outside of the big technology names (msft, google, fb, etc.) there's a huge collection of companies where either a) the brand is known but the company isn't know for being an innovative place in the hacker community or b) the company isn't known and neither is the team. In both of type (a) and (b) companies you hear a lot of moaning from managers right now about how they can't find any good folks to hire. So I'll qualify my advice a little bit: If you find you're having a hard time finding "rockstar-ninja-l88t programmers" by posting to Monster.com, maybe consider that you're approaching hiring in the wrong way.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
interknot 15y ago
It's telling that their "Innovation group" is shackled with the same restrictions as the rest of the company.
dredmorbius 15y ago
Some years back there was a discussion of how Free Software was saving IBM's research labs. The problem being that there's a lot of cool stuff you can work on at the labs, but unless there's a $50m or $100m market for it, there's no interest in productizing the project. What creating a culture of allowing work on Free Software projects allowed, among other things, was satisfaction and motivation among the lab engineers in being able to produce work which, even if not immediately transformed into IBM products, was available to others. Some eventually did get rolled in to at least consulting services work (particularly in the Apache space). Sounds like your F100 was all about killing golden-egg laying geese. And I understand your response entirely.
georgemcbay 15y ago
"Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting." It will also make it harder/more costly for them to retain their top talent (since external groups will be able to identify them for poaching), so good luck getting many of them to buy into this.
- dblock 15y ago
  What data do you have to support this? I think it's the exact opposite.
- billybob 15y ago
  Which is no different from having your top talent poached based on resumes or word of mouth. Quiz: if you're worried about your best employees being recruited away, how do you react? 1. Give them more opportunities to grow, learn, advance, and increase their earnings. 2. Try to chain them to your company with restrictive policies. If you said "#2", I can tell you why your people are looking elsewhere.

kenjackson 15y ago

Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting. Apple barely lets their employees blog even, and last I checked they're doing OK by all counts. Unfortunately, the intersection for people who are passionate about their 9to5 work and those that are passionate about their side-project seems to actually be fairly small.

jashmenn 15y ago
So I agree with you in the case of Apple. But let's dissect for a minute why this is the case. Apple can be incredibly secretive and still hire with no problems because 1) they are literally creating world-changing products and people want to be involved with that 2) they have a reputation for hiring extremely bright people. If you take a job at Apple you will interact with them (/ be one of them) But outside of the big technology names (msft, google, fb, etc.) there's a huge collection of companies where either a) the brand is known but the company isn't know for being an innovative place in the hacker community or b) the company isn't known and neither is the team. In both of type (a) and (b) companies you hear a lot of moaning from managers right now about how they can't find any good folks to hire. So I'll qualify my advice a little bit: If you find you're having a hard time finding "rockstar-ninja-l88t programmers" by posting to Monster.com, maybe consider that you're approaching hiring in the wrong way.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

interknot 15y ago

It's telling that their "Innovation group" is shackled with the same restrictions as the rest of the company.

dredmorbius 15y ago

Some years back there was a discussion of how Free Software was saving IBM's research labs. The problem being that there's a lot of cool stuff you can work on at the labs, but unless there's a $50m or $100m market for it, there's no interest in productizing the project. What creating a culture of allowing work on Free Software projects allowed, among other things, was satisfaction and motivation among the lab engineers in being able to produce work which, even if not immediately transformed into IBM products, was available to others. Some eventually did get rolled in to at least consulting services work (particularly in the Apache space). Sounds like your F100 was all about killing golden-egg laying geese. And I understand your response entirely.

georgemcbay 15y ago

"Companies: allow your employees to freely work on open-source and it will improve your recruiting." It will also make it harder/more costly for them to retain their top talent (since external groups will be able to identify them for poaching), so good luck getting many of them to buy into this.

dblock 15y ago
What data do you have to support this? I think it's the exact opposite.
billybob 15y ago
Which is no different from having your top talent poached based on resumes or word of mouth. Quiz: if you're worried about your best employees being recruited away, how do you react? 1. Give them more opportunities to grow, learn, advance, and increase their earnings. 2. Try to chain them to your company with restrictive policies. If you said "#2", I can tell you why your people are looking elsewhere.