"My personal experience, by the way has been precisely opposite: my open source experience has led to more job opportunities, easier interviews, and more career

"My personal experience, by the way has been precisely opposite: my open source experience has led to more job opportunities, easier interviews, and more career freedom in general." This is my experience too and that in a screwed up job market like India/Bangalore where most companies are essentially bodyshoppers who couldn't care less. Open source has helped me (a) get interesting job/consulting offers (b) cut out large chunks of useless interviews from the recruiting process(One interviewer started the interview with "Your open source work is impressive enough to the point where a technical interview is not required and to be honest you are much better technically than I am, but hey we have to go through the motions of an interview so tell me what you want to know about the company and what we do ") (c) connect me to very talented people in the fields I am interested in (d) generally open all kinds of doors I didn't know existed. I've also been on the other side of the process where someone started his cv with "I wrote [impressive piece of code we used every day] that is shipped with the Python distribution". I checked out the repository, just to make sure - his code was very high quality -and added my comment to the electronic copy of his cv "hire this guy NOW. Pay him whatever he wants. Don't let him get away." And since I was known to be a "tough interviewer" who rejected large numbers of people, HR was happy to oblige. The rest of the recruitment process was just a formality. All this is so contra the experience narrated in the blog that I found it very surprising till I happened across this line "One of the reasons I worked so hard on open source projects was to make job interviews easier." This doesn't make any sense to me. I can't imagine writing open source code in order to make interviews easier. That is (sometimes) a side effect certainly, but I've chosen projects based on what interested me and "scratched my itch". I frankly could give a damn if no one else used it or found it interesting as long as it tests out a theory/ saves me time or money/ teaches me something. Open Sourcing the code is something I do besides whatever value the code provides to me, as a behavioral norm in support of a community that has given me so much quality code. (I have an Ubuntu workstation , use django, gcc ... ).