Does Open Source Experience Help in Todays Job Market? Everyone is saying recessions benefit open source.

Is the same true for job seek ers? Bryan Richard Bryan Richard is a writer and software developer, avid runner, pretty good cook, and has a habit of buying more books than he can read. He s also the VP of Comm unity and Infrastructure for Linux Magazine. Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 Community Tools to remember a couple of recessions. I can recall when my dad was laid off in 198 2 and struggled to find work as a welder for nearly a year. I largely missed the recession of the early 90s since I was in college but was smack dab in the midd le of the 2000-2001 Internet bubble. Still, none of these seem to compare to wha t were seeing now: More than 6 million US workers are drawing unemployment benefi ts, 600,000 laid off last month alone. Tech wasnt necessarily at the heart of thi s crisis but its feeling its share of the pain with layoffs at Novell, Sun, IBM, M icrosoft and a slew of others. It goes without saying that being laid off is a horrible experience. But if youre new to really bad job markets or are just now trying to enter the work force its doubly shocking. Probably the best thing that you can know is that youre not alo ne. Quite a few people have gone through or are going through a similar situatio n and its good to know that even though its dark and possibly getting darker1 thes e cycles do happen and we will come out of it. Theres a lot of chatter going around that open source excels in recession environ ments. Im a little on the fence about that claim I remember watching Red Hats stoc k price following their IPO and the 2001 stock crash; it was a good 2+ years bef ore it recovered. Things may be vastly different today then they were in 2001 an d I hope they are but what Im interested in talking about today is whether open s ource benefits anyone looking for a job right now. In theory, if open source com panies grow in a recession, they should also be hiring. I suppose I could whip up a list of ways to beef up your resume with open source , but Im not all that good at that sort of thing (hopefully something like that w ill appear in the comments). Rather, I thought Id share my own tale of recession, jobs, and how open source figured in. In 2000-2001, when the Internet bubble started to collapse, not only were compan ies laying people off in droves but a huge number of companies were simply disap pearing overnight. As quickly as everything had been built, it came crashing dow n doubly fast, and the result was, for the most part, employment chaos. I was wo rking as a software developer at the time and in the span of a year I changed jo bs three times, moving to a new position generally just before the previous comp any failed.2 I was actually pretty fortunate and able to find work until about l ate-2001 when I was laid off the day before Thanksgiving (Happy Holidays!). I sp ent the next year more or less freelancing and not being paid until I landed a j ob writing Active Server Pages (ASP). This was a pretty low point in my career. Writing ASP isnt exactly a ton of fun b ut when you pair it with the most boring work in the world (Intranets that never launch! Meetings so many meetings, a management ban on COM objects, &c.), it st arts to grate on you. I used to invent excuses to go play with the HP3000 just f or a change of pace. It was a paycheck, but something had to change. Eventually, I decided that open source would be the best outlet for my frustrati ons and tried to spend as much time with it as I could. I started by talking the head sys admin into allowing my Linux laptop onto the network (the only Linux m achine box on a network of something like 750 machines). I introduced the guy in the cubicle next to mine to Cygwin, and the two hit it off instantly. Somehow c onvinced management that we needed a Linux server just to run cron jobs since *. bat files were prone to error (still not sure how I managed this one). And gener ally threw myself at Python. I learned the language (it fits your brain) and wrote it every chance I could. I m

ade some (very small) contributions to open source projects, wrote Python docume ntation and started a short-lived magazine. Eventually, I caught the attention o f the crew at Linux Magazine and by late-2002 I was running a PHP conference for the company. Ive been hanging around ever since. So, thats my (extremely linear and abbreviated) tale, from nearly 10 years ago. I t leaves out a lot of the long nights spent hunched over a laptop, the bone-shak ing worry about the crumbling job market, and downright luck that I fell into th e position that I did. But it was a path that followed a trail of open source cr umbs. And, in the end, it worked for me. Now, Id like to hear what you think. Is open source the best path to a job in tod ays market? And, if so, how should someone go about it? Are you out of work and l ooking for advice? Drop a note in the comments; maybe someone can help. 1 Probably. Maybe. There are optimists among us. 2 On one memorable Tuesday morning, I got an IM from a friend still working at t he job I had left a week before saying they couldnt print anything over the netwo rk. Why? I asked. Because the printers were too busy printing everyones checks. The company was evicted from the building later that day.