It's anecdotal evidence. I don't have a degree and I don't contribute to open source because I have something better to do in my free time. Still, I have a decent developer job.
I care about people who can get the job done. Having a degree doesn't prove to me that you can. Showing me a catalogue of open-source contributions is a much more powerful suggestion that you can work on software and document it for others for consumption.
The benefit of open source is that anyone can contribute, thus someone that cannot afford a university degree or does not have the social network that comes with high status can still prove their skill as a software engineer and find a high paying job.
Why not just throw yourself into an open source project? Many pay down the road if you're successful enough, and you get to keep your dignity. More importantly, you'll know you aren't being exploited.
Maybe for junior devs to get their foot in the door, but not for any higher level positions. You can't tell very much about someone's engineering skills based on some public commits to a side project and very few people (<1%) are writing open source professionally.
For me, it's the somewhat selfish but defensible idea that open source is a good way to get experience with technologies that I don't get to use in my day job. I get some amount of pride in seeing my name in release notes etc but that is about it, I don't do Twitter, don't have followers, and am not high-profile in any way.
So how would you judge someone like me who has no open source projects? Work stuff is in house, and I don't have the time outside of work to contribute anything meaningful.
I happened to watch a conference talk on YouTube by the director of infrastructure at Netflix. He closed it out by saying, yes we open source everything, and yes this solution works for us. But just because we do it doesn't mean you should. Do what works for you.
But in reality...I only need it because people on the other side of the interview table expects every engineer to have 3-5 years experience of x,y, z.
I can’t help feeling like we engineers are shooting ourselves in the foot with the open source culture: Most challenging and interesting work is turning into unpaid (open source) hobby projects. Professional software engineering is more and more about cobbling together various open source software, fiddling with configuration files and other menial tasks. Also, where is my “open source lawyer” or “open source doctor” whose work I can download from GitHub for free and file my issues / complaints with there?
I guess this benefits the mediocre software engineer (who can now accomplish things by cobbling together open source that they would never be able to accomplish from scratch), and perhaps it’s also a plus for the top 0.001% who are good hustlers too and can make a career out of touring around conferences as some kind of nerd celebrities. But for the skilled and professional engineer (say top 5-25%) I’m starting to feel it’s a trap.
(Open source is great for basic infrastructure though, like operating systems, compilers, interpreters, frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, etc. I’m definitely not against it in general.)
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