Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#61

Post by dochtman » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 9:18 AM UTC

Osmose wrote: post #50

davidascher wrote: post #43

This is one path: http://www.mozilla.org/careers Partial proof: https://github.com/mozilla/repositories https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/repositories (that's 30 _pages_ of github repos, not including the stuff we do that's not on github: http://mxr.mozilla.org/ )

Case in point: Source code for the careers site linked above can be found at https://github.com/mozilla/lumbergh/ (we just recently released a redesign, yay!)

It would sure be nice if there was a specific person/contact for each open position, or even any email address you can contact, on the site.

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#62

Post by agilebyte » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 9:56 AM UTC

kim_rutherford wrote: post #58

agilebyte wrote: post #4

You can work on academic projects funded by public money. The results are open source. Ours, in bioinformatics: http://intermine.org

I definitely recommend scientific programming as a career. I've worked as a programmer on bioinformatics projects in academia for the last 15 years. Everything has been open source. Academia doesn't pay as well as the Real World but there are many benefits. As well as being able to work on open source software, the work is usually interesting. Job security has been excellent and I've moved jobs when I've wanted to (5…

Hi Kim!

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#63

Post by dachary » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 11:34 AM UTC

Ten years ago I funded my own company and became a Free Software vegetarian : not eating nor cooking anything but Free Software. I'm a developer and a few years later switched back to being an employee rather than a manager.

During the interviews I apologized for the inconveniences of exclusively using and making Free Software. The vegetarian image helped a great deal. What also helped a lot was that I already made the commitments years ago. It would have been a lot harder otherwise : how could you justify applying for a new job and at the same time apply new standards ?

I work as a Ceph developer in the context of OpenStack : very fashionable and easier to get jobs. That also helps a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#64

Post by andrewcooke » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 2:56 PM UTC

avenger123 wrote: post #54

andrewcooke wrote: post #2

for a year or two i worked for mulesource, who make the open-source mule esb (these days, if you visit their site, i think there's more not-so-open stuff as they try to make money, but back in the day it was pretty much open source + paid support). anyway, i got that job by using mule in my previous job, and writing some blog posts explaining it - mainly intended for my co-workers, but i posted them on the net. that,…

I would like to spend some time in the coming months to learn to use MuleSoft's ESB. Are there any resources outside of what's on the site that you would recommend? In particular, I see that there is onsite training but I would love to have more in-depth training material that's in a pdf or ebook type format or even just online.

it's been some years now, sorry - i have no idea what's available. all i did was download it and use it to implement various patterns (see enterprise patterns book).

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#65

Post by 3riverdev » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 4:08 PM UTC

Red Hatter here. If you want to work full-time on engineering within an open source project, the easiest way to get noticed by a commercial backer is making many quality contributions to the project. If we need to hire additional engineers, we'll typically ask some of the community developers first, prior to recruiting publicly.

That being said, there are many opportunities to work on the projects, albeit a little less "directly". Companies like Red Hat have large teams dedicated to QA, support, etc. Most of them are actively involved in contributing bug fixes, test cases, and directly working with customers. These types of positions do not usually require as much direct experience with the project as the engineering teams do.

And as one commenter already pointed out, we're definitely hiring! http://jobs.redhat.com/

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#66

Post by malandrew » Sun, Nov 03, 2013, 6:40 PM UTC

xs_kid wrote: post #47

malandrew wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be awesome if we could add a new "Who's Hiring?" thread each month but an open-source edition. i.e. any company or startup, large or small could advertise the open source project they are will to pay people to work on, if it is part-time or full-time and whether it is on-site or remote.

Please do it

I guess that getting this started just means getting up at 6am on the next first of the month and posting a thread. Or is there a special account or person that is responsible for those threads?

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#67

Post by cbr » Mon, Nov 04, 2013, 5:56 AM UTC

defied wrote: post #59

cbr wrote: post #52

I applied to work at Google, got hired, and was matched to the PageSpeed team. Now I work on https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed It's nice working on free software, but I'd really be just as happy if I'd ended up in a different part of the company.

You're doing good work with ngx_pagespeed! Been running ngx_pagespeed in production for a couple of months now and very happy with it.

Thanks! Let me know if you have any issues with it.

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#68

Post by cbr » Mon, Nov 04, 2013, 5:59 AM UTC

zerr wrote: post #60

cbr wrote: post #52

I applied to work at Google, got hired, and was matched to the PageSpeed team. Now I work on https://github.com/pagespeed/ngx_pagespeed It's nice working on free software, but I'd really be just as happy if I'd ended up in a different part of the company.

Didn't you have a chance to express the preference of where you'd like to end up? Also, did you were a fresh grad when you got hired?

I was offered the choice between three teams, all of which sounded interesting and only one of which worked on open source. I chose pagespeed mostly because I was interested in working on the A/B testing framework, which needed a new owner.

I wasn't a fresh grad; four years and two jobs out of school at that point.

Re: Ask HN: Getting paid to work on open source full-time?

#69

Post by logn » Mon, Nov 04, 2013, 7:01 AM UTC

dotBen wrote: post #28

This is an interesting question, because I'm in the process of looking to hire an engineer to work full time on contributing to WordPress. The twist is I'm looking for someone who is currently not part of the WordPress Community , which has made the search interesting. I know WordPress has a mixed view here on HN, but that's kind of the point - we're ( http://wpengine.com ) looking to bring some "outside blood" with…

> So, my reverse question is where would you go to find folks who want to work on Open Source.

I could do it for you. But I'm not a PHP programmer and don't live in Austin. That's probably why you're having trouble finding people. I could also get together a remote team and manage or work with them for you. It's what I did for my last client (actually, an Austin company as well).