Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

the problem is that this doesn't matter, because all the industry expects is programming skills, and while any fachhochschule, french engineering school, or even a US community college could provide those programming skills, the university provides them too, and as a result, a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools.

if i can, i will prefer the school that gives me more options later on. that also explains why everyone wants to get into the top schools, because those provide even more options.

computer science students would have to have a bad reputation as programmers in order to stop companies who need programmers from hiring them.

or we change the system such that you always start with vocational training as a programmer on a school dedicated for that before you decide to either get a job or move on into academics. requiring that academic researchers have relevant industry level training doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Documentation is also a good thing to add. The perspective of a fresh user is precious and only lasts so long. Documenting the onboarding process can point to documentation shortcomings that are great to fix.

Open source is a great source of learning; architecture choices, battle tested real-world software. So, if a student asks for my opinion, I would say fork it, clone it, study it and if you find something to contribute, great submit your pull request.

But not all students in training are skilled, and making code contribution a required part of a program seems certain to reduce the average quality of PRs. The problem is that somebody has to review those PRs, and often interact with the proposer for quite a while, to teach them the approach that is desired for the individual project. PRs that go against the grain are not always worth the effort.

In the scenario of the article, open-source developers are saddled with a new task: teaching students, many of whom will be unmotivated by anything more than a grade.

No thanks. Hard pass.

If professors want students to learn how to interact in a group setting, then the students ought to be designing their own software. If there's a perceived need for larger-scale projects, the professors ought to set them up and maintain cohesion and momentum across terms. If the professors don't have ideas for such projects or the time to spearhead them, well, then that's a bit of a sign.