The panelists at Versatile PhD did say that contributing to open source projects was a good way to develop an online portfolio. But it sounded more like they were just repeating conventional industry advice. It didn't sound like any of them had worked on anything open source themselves. I was just trying to suggest that for academics who don't have the CS background and software internships, getting involved in the open source community would be a good way to develop software skills and find a community that will support someone with an atypical background. Also, it's not that easy to jump into an open source project and start making contributions as someone who is new to the community and new to software. Suggesting to someone that they should go make open source contributions to pad their resume, without giving them any guidance or even explaining to them the FOSS ethos -- that seems a tad irresponsible. That's why I put the emphasis on joining the FOSS community rather than focusing on making contributions. No open source project maintainer likes getting random pull requests.
Honestly, I think it's pretty tough nowadays for a PhD non-CS graduate to break into the software industry. In most cases, wouldn't a company prefer to hire some CS bachelor's graduate who's done 2-3 internships? Those people can hit the ground running. The only reason to hire a non-CS PhD is if they have some specialized domain experience that's relevant to the product. Terri On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Timothée Poisot <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree with Greg wholeheartedly. Communicating the idea that 60hrs week > is not only normal, but expected and a requirement for success, to PhD > candidates, is a step in the wrong direction. > > If I were to look at a candidate github profile, I would look at how they > behave in issues and pull requests as opposed to how frequently they push > code or the number of projects. > Sent from a mobile device. Pardon the typos/brevity. > On dim., févr. 28, 2016 at 12:04 PM, Greg Wilson < > [email protected]> wrote: > > I've grown disillusioned with the idea of using GitHub as a resume - I > think that expecting people to spend 20 hr/week *on top of* their 40 > hr/week job is doing harm to people's mental health, their family lives, > and any hope we have of fixing computing's diversity problem. Ashe Dryden's > article > http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community > sums it up better than I could, and I like this quote: > > when you use GitHub for hiring you’re taking a tool that people use as a > collaboration space and backup service, and using it for an unintended > purpose: judging whether people are any good or not. > > > from James Coglan's follow-up at > https://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/. > > Cheers, > Greg > > -- > Dr Greg Wilson > Director of Instructor Training > Software Carpentry Foundation > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org >
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