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

Sort of - I became active in the Redis community when it was just starting to pick up. Mostly helping out users and giving local talks, but occasionally contributing some code as well.

Over the years this led to several job offers, and while I didn't directly take any of them, I stayed in frequent touch with the founders of Redis Labs, who found me through this activity. And a few years later when I was looking for a new job, they were my natural choice. And one of the best jobs I've ever had.

Several people have gotten well-paying jobs due to contributing to the D programming language effort.

I highly recommend GSoC. It is a fantastic opportunity to learn and contribute to an open-source project by having a mentor from that project that you can talk to, and get paid to do it.

I was already contributing to an open-source project (fireflier) when I applied for GSoC for the ClamAV project, and continued to contribute to the project after GSoC was over. Shortly afterwards got invited to be part of the team, and when the project got acquired by a company the next year I got a job there to continue working on it (initially part-time because I wanted to finish my studies at the university, and after that full time).

Try to apply to 3 or 4 projects that you like, but don't get too disappointed if you don't get accepted the first time. It probably helps if you already are a contributor to an open-source project so that people can check your coding style/knowledge by looking at GitHub/Sourceforge etc.

Yup, all of them in fact, it's a very tangible proof you can work on the subject. Sadly, I do mostly Python and JS so I can't mentor you but as mentionned in other comments, lot of projects are looking for contributors, Firefox is good project for example.

I have an open source project that absolutely got me hired to Intuit years ago.

The biggest win of doing open source work is that it’s more challenging than corporate work. You build product management skills and really learn to focus on objective quality factors and continuous improvement.

At this point in my career I have passed the tipping point and my open source work is making me less compatible to many of my corporate JavaScript peers. I am not interested in easy, dicking around with unnecessary configuration madness, and prefer to write original code. I am less interested in learning how to write code and more interested in data structures and algorithm design. Contrarily JavaScript is a low barrier of entry field where many newer developers have little or regard for automation practices compared to various other concerns.