Open source equals portfolio?

This is just a quick question for those that develop programs open source. Do recruiters respect those that have made successful programs and are quite popular on sourceforge? Does it help getting your foot in the door?

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Comments

sprkymrk

I've never done an open source projct, but I would have to assume that would look good as a bullet point on a resume.

JDMurray

A recruiter is not likely to understand anything that a programmer does. They just look for qualities and capabilities in a candidate as defined by a hiring manager. It the hiring manager that your Open Source project must impress.

If your Open Source project demonstrates the skills, knowledge, and experience a hiring manager is looking for then it will certainly help you get the job. In fact, because you can demonstrate your work, provide full source code, and show how the user community favorably reacts to your product, I'd say that Open Source projects are better advertisements than closed-source projects for getting a software development job.

Schluep

JDMurray is right that it will like mean nothing to HR who has not idea how a program is written. The benefit of having it on your resume is that if the Hiring Manager is trying to decide who out of a group of 10 people recommended by HR to interview he could always go look at the code of your resume and see exactly how you write and whether or not it is what he is looking for. That could be a benefit or a detriment depending on how organized it is and what the company is looking for. This would probably be a rare event and it is unlikely that this amount of detail would be observed, but in those rare cases it could be to your benefit.

More than likely it will come up in the interview with the hiring manager and this would be the best time to bring it up. Putting it on a resume seem advantageous however. I have no personal experience in this regard though as I have never published an open source program.

Tesl

Will echo what the others say. Recruiter won't care/understand, but having open source projects you can demonstrate is always a *big* plus. One of the reasons I have the job I have is that I could demonstrate OSS work I did in my spare time. It's not that its necessarily complicated software, but it demonstrates enthusiasm for software development.