[fedora-india] Project FOSS properly - was [Re: request for speaker for our FOSS festival Mukti 2010]

[Debayan Banerjee]

2010/1/8 Aanjhan R <aanjhan at gmail.com>

>
>
> And its all about how you project. I think you have forgotten the
> '3-emails' sent by SM to dgplug list. I bring it up again.
>
>
> http://www.tuxmaniac.com/blog/2008/11/03/foss-education-career-skill-development-the-relationship/
>

The 3 emails were good. However over time I found a few paradoxes.
Since I left college 7 months back i have been in 2 companies. Both the
companies hired me for my FOSS involvement. 4 other friends of mine are in
the present company today because of their FOSS involvement.
If I go give a talk at some college I will end up saying the opposite. FOSS
does get you a job. Does it get everyone a job? Depends on how you define
the term contributor.
If the contribution is in code your chances of landing a job hence will
obviously be higher than of you are into l10n.
To be able to truly analyse whether FOSS gets you a job or not, you need to
ask yourself how many of your FOSS contributor (in code) friends are jobless
for a long time. Are you sure they did not talk about their FOSS project in
the interview? Atleast all the contributor friends I have did talk about
their projects.
However I do agree that this is not a selling point (ermm) for free
software. This point wont affect people who are into the programming contest
culture. The top companies hire people who do well in programming contests.
Google for example specifically advises potential employees to practice on
TopCoder on their recruiting page.
However to say that it wont get you a job has the potential threat of
frightening off the odd contributor at a very early stage.
How then, should an engineering college student be talked to? 1) Tell your
story . Thats all. Then its upto him.



-- 
Regards,
Debayan Banerjee
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