Ask HN: Has anyone got a job by contributing to open source projects?

As far as I understand from the description, you're interpreting open source contribution in a very specific (albeit typical) way:

    1. generically contributing to a well-known project to get recognition by the industry;
    2. get hired in a certain project team through specific feature(s)

The first is that a lot of people in the industry try this way (I did it, too), and this makes "newcomers management" onerous for projects.

The second is that commitment to newcomers is unrelated to the project size/fame. You'd think that large and established projects necessarily care about newcomers; there is no such connection. A notoriously committed community/project is for example GitLab; I won't mention another "very famous project" who couldn't care less, instead (to the point of labelling issues as "good first issue" and then ignoring them).

There are obviously project-external devs who gets their code approved, but based on what I've seen, they're people with experience in the field, and who work in a more targeted fashion (ie. approach 2).

I don't have experience with approach 2, however, if fits exactly the GSoC initiative, so you may either try to get in, or, in order to find a real-world answer to your question, research how many of the GSoC students are generally hired.

My opinion related to improving one's career by contributing to open source is to contribute to welcoming projects that you find interesting, and get known in the field. In other words, networking. I think start working on a famous/big project with career in mind has a very high chance of leading to frustration.

My direct answer to your question is "yes, I do know people who got a job with their involvement in open source", and it was about networking, not about working on a famous project.

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/650968538564444160

The one thing that made this a job opportunity (my career is coreboot-based for about 12 years now) was that I built some rapport within the communities. These days I'm paid to work on Chrome OS firmware, which uses coreboot.

Becoming the go-to person for some aspect of the project is easier for smaller projects rather than huge operations like Chromium for several reasons, among them:

1. No matter what you do, you won't out-run an army of full time developers that have multiple levels of management to coordinate their efforts (which is a force-multiplier to some degree).

2. Projects the size of Chromium tend to have lots of discussion internally within participating teams. There's no ill will about this, it's just how people work when they happen to share both project and office space.

So yes, open source work can lead to fine careers, but you'll need some differentiator that makes people go "maybe I should ask anindha about this".

If or when that happens in a "marketable" project (as far as careers go there was certainly luck involved in my story: openbios has little commercial use, and coreboot's commercial prospects looked grim for a while as well), at some point some team will want to have you work on their tasks full time: Much better than hoping that you aren't busy doing whatever else you need to pay the bills.

There are probably other ways to get a career based on open source work, but that was mine.

If the entire stack is open source based (most of devops that isn't Windows, for example), it certainly gives you lots more opportunities if you can show that you know what you're talking about, and if your name rings a bell with people in that space.

For developing line of business java/.net applications (which is a _huge_ field) open source contributions don't matter on the resume and might even be a net negative.