On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 01:46:13PM -0500, Terri Yu wrote: > 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.
Some communities try a lot harder to be welcoming than others. Jumping in completely cold is always going to be a challenge, but if you find software that you use, patches to improve documentation are usually a good entry point (especially for academics with lots of technical-writing experience). And +1 to Timothée and Martin for clarifying “contributions” as broadly scoped [1,2]. The more information you can provide demonstrating your competence in related fields, the better, and commits are only a tiny slice of the contribution pie. Obviously you'll want an organized résumé to point employers at useful bits. “I'm also good at building consensus, for example …” will be better supported with “… see these mailing list threads [link,link,link]” than with “… see the discuss@ archives [3]”. > 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. That sounds reasonable to me. For example, helping out with SWC gets you open-source contributions (you can point potential employers at lesson commits, issue/list discussion, blog posts, workshop sites, etc.) while at the same time learning the skills you need to be a productive developer. > No open source project maintainer likes getting random pull > requests. Actually, I love getting random pull requests and issue reports, especially if the contributor has thoughtfully laid out why they made the change or how they triggered the bug they're submitting. I'm occasionally overwhelmed by volume, but contributions don't usually flow in that fast ;). > Honestly, I think it's pretty tough nowadays for a PhD non-CS > graduate to break into the software industry… This is probably true of most industries. Hiring usually involves both parties convincing the other that they'll be good matches. If the prospective employee can point at commits, issue/list comments, bug reports, membership on a technical committee, blog posts, references from folks who've seen your closed-source work, pointers to sections in your thesis that demonstrate skills useful to the position in question, etc., I'd hear you out (I don't make hiring decisions, but I share my perspective on candidates with the folks who do). And maybe the closest you can get is “this thesis is large and still readable, which shows that I'm well organized and a good communicator”. If you're applying for a doc-writing or bug-wrangling postition, that may be all you need. If you're applying for an entry-level software position, it may still be enough, but you'd have to be pretty convincing to beat out someone with demonstrable programming experience. If you're applying for anything that requires architecture design, you're probably out of luck. To Martin's earlier point about small businesses and training [4], the small business I work for doesn't have the capacity for hiring non-programmers for programming positions and training them on the job. We do have the capacity for hiring people for technical, non-programming jobs and then gradually helping them transition into programming jobs. Martin pointed out that that doesn't always work, but if the non-programming job is a good enough match, you have a longer timespan for the programming training and there's no need to transition completely. But I expect folks transitioning from unrelated fields into software development will be more successful if they try to make a number of smaller pivots than if they shoot for a full-time-developer position right off the bat. Cheers, Trevor [1]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2016-February/003944.html Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2016 12:42:33 -0500 Message-Id: <[email protected]> [2]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2016-February/003945.html Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2016 19:36:08 +0100 Message-ID: <[email protected]> [3]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/ [4]: http://lists.software-carpentry.org/pipermail/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org/2016-February/003950.html Date: Sun, 28 Feb 2016 20:52:15 +0100 Message-ID: <[email protected]> -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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