I agree with you, lots of companies are hypocritical and they ask for open source work from candidates, yet they make it either impossible/illegal, or at least

I agree with you, lots of companies are hypocritical and they ask for open source work from candidates, yet they make it either impossible/illegal, or at least very very hard for employees (jump through 5 approval steps that take months and force you to work overtime for publishing) to actually contribute to open source. Another annoying thing is when a company doesn't even have any open source work published under their name, yet they expect the same from candidates. When a company like that asks whether I do open-source, I pretend I misunderstood the question and just say: > "I didn't know open-source is important for this company, I didn't find anything published by the company. Could you share the company's GitHub account? Maybe I mistook it with a different account. I'd love to see how company X contributes to the community." > > "But anyway, yes, I'd love to contribute to open source as part of my day job". It's always funny to see them squirm, and clarify that they want to see my open source stuff, but they never did anything in that arena. Usually, that's also the time I decide to stop the interviewing process. I don't care if you don't do open source, but then don't make it a requirement for candidates. I actually do have some open source projects, so it's not like I couldn't talk about stuff at an interview, but I still hate it when companies ask for open source when they themselves have nothing to show for. Another thing to mention here is that having a better-than-average open source portfolio helped me a lot at me career, so I definitely recommend it, for example at the company I work for, they skipped the entire coding challenge during the hiring process, and I got a better offer, too.