Can we afford ignoring the "OpenSource contributor" part of candidate's resume?

I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine today. Basically he insisted that although he has “two interesting #OpenSource projects”, agents never asked him about his contributions on GitHub. He also insisted that he will not even look at a person's #GitHub, even if it states “OSS contributor”.

To my surprise, my friend is partially right here. If a person creates to an “interesting project”, which brings no value to the society - why should I care? It might demo some coding skills or might not.

However, if somebody translated an OSS project to Hindi, so a wider group of people can start using it - well, I will be VERY interested in interviewing this person. I already know that this person is aimed at bringing value to society. If that person also loves the process of contributions - we are dealing with an amazing human being, who should be hired asap.

At the end of the day, people are hired to bring an impact, not to “write code for fun” or to “build the most perfect algorithm”, unless the last two impact society in a positive way.

To conclude, I would be interested in hiring Linus Torvald-like-minded-in-OSS people not because they are the best in some algorithms. I am sure they are not. However I know that hiring such a person will create a huge positive impact and value to the company. So there is point to pay well above the “market rate” to this person, as the business value created is “highly likely” to be huge.

I understand there are always “corner cases”, but I hope you’ve got my point :)

If I still haven’t convinced you - please join our meetup Together, we OpenSource and we will help you to find your love in OSS world and start contributing to it, while benefiting the society.

Why join our meetup? The reasons are many, some of them are: it is fun it is free it happens regularly, 2 times each Sunday (to allow people from different time zones to take part) our main goal is to help people from underprivileged or under-represented backgrounds and we do deliver we accept everybody, given you are of a good character (0 tolerance to racism, hate speech or any other kind of discrimination) you may end up getting a luxury job in IT :)

Special thanks to Ivan Kostruba, who inspired me to write this article by providing his positive feedback and criticism of my ideas.