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Where to Advertise for Open Source Job Openings? 82

Posted by Cliff from the plugged-into-the-network dept.
OS Jobs asks: "The startup I work at is looking for an IT maven to design and run a large cluster (1000s) of Linux machines. We are fully plugged into the open source philosophy and would like to build this cluster using only open source tools. We have advertised at most of the regular places including Monster, various LUGs, and so forth. In response to our ads we see people with industrial experience who know every proprietary product in existence, but almost none who are steeped in open source development. So my question to the Slashdot community is: Where should open-source conscious employers advertise their open-source friendly jobs?"
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Where to Advertise for Open Source Job Openings? More

Where to Advertise for Open Source Job Openings?

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  • On slashdot (Score:5, Funny)

    by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:00PM (#15822241)
    You've already done it. Post an email address and await the deluge.

  • I think you know the answer... (Score:5, Informative)

    by kebes ( 861706 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:10PM (#15822275) Journal
    I suspect that the poster's question will become answered when he receives many email regarding this job opportunity.

    Basically a great place to advertise the job is Slashdot! Of course, this is not really a sustainable strategy (not every OSS job offer will merit a Slashdot story)...

    You should consider clicking on the "Jobs" link on the OSTG bar that is at the top of Slashdot. I suspect that many OSS-savvy Slashdot readers use that when looking for jobs, so getting the offer listed there (it appears to link to Yahoo! HotJobs) would probably be a good idea.

    • Re:I think you know the answer... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by joe_bruin ( 266648 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @11:06PM (#15822517) Homepage Journal
      If the people who run Slashdot had any brains, they'd have had a real Technology Jobs section, not a halfassed partnership with Hotjobs. I mean, they're running the biggest geek site on the planet, where many of these people spend their down time. If they had posted a real job section, they could take over that market (particularly in the OSS section). Imagine a site where people can post comments about the jobs listed, and potentially communicate that way with the employer for all to read (hey, there's something that other job sites just don't do), where I can specify that I want a job doing C but not C++ (no other site has the geek focus that you can find here), and where, if I'm looking for a job, I can have job results come up in between my other Slashdot stories (that I read every day anyway).

      And employers would *pay* to post jobs. Imagine having your position seen by all system admins worldwide that checked a box that they want to see sysadmin jobs on their Slashdot homepage? The response would be huge. Of course, far be it from OSTG from doing something that could make them money.
      • I wish there was a job site where users could comment on the job, even after the job was filled, giving rankings to the employers and interview process. You could even have a tagging system to tag jobs as contract, full time, new grad,or only accepts resumes in word format. I think that many of the job websites out there do a really poor job for the people trying to find the job. A site where the people searching could categorize the stuff themselves would really help to get the stuff organized better. G
        • Man that's a great idea. Sort of like one of those "rate your professor" or "rate your school" deals some sites have for colleges. Anonymity would be the key though. If the employer can find out who you are, no one is going to be honest. That could be legally tricky when you get into NDA's (non-disclosure agreements) though. Ten years ago, I would have said that this wasn't a problem (since presumably you couldn't sign your free speech rights with a lousy form). But today, "free speech" doesn't exactly carr
          • I don't think NDA's would come into it very much. Unless you are giving out technical information about what the company is doing, I fail to see where the problem would be. I don't think they can stop you from telling your friends about how much your job sucks, they probably can't stop you from telling the whole world either. Making it anonymous would be very important, as you wouldn't want to lose your job by giving your company bad ratings. Even if your job is satisfactory, I could see people losing j
            • So how do you avoid the problem of employers astroturfing?
            • The problem is that a company that tolerated negative comments from present and former employees would quickly find themselves in a very bad situation.

              First off, why would anyone post something positive? That means almost everything is going to be negative. Mostly inaccurate, but with a grain of truth to it.

              Then, if you knew about such a message board and looked at it, would you want to go and find out if all of the terrible things you were reading were accurate? Or, would you just pass it on by as not b
              • Well, I don't think all the comments would be bad. Head over to Rate My Professors [ratemyprofessors.com] if you want to see this kind of think in action. There's plenty of profs who get good ratings. There's also some professors I consider pretty terrible who got a few good ratings. Different people like different things. And there's not much an employer could do to stop ex-employees from posting. There isn't much they could do to stop a current employee from posting. If they kept no data about who posted, then they would
        • I'm working on this very thing, geared primarily toward computer wonks like ourselves.

          E-mail me if you're interested in getting in on the beta testing/bulletproofing.

          -Ed
        • You mean like the Vault [thevault.com]?
      • I wish slashdot had a jobs section too. I'd be looking through it now.
    • I'd apply in a heartbeat, except that while I live and breath open source, I don't live and breath open source clustering. Also, I'm probably not qualified (only 4-6 years professional experience, which sounds good until you read a birthdate in 1987), and there's a female to consider. Is the poster, by any chance, somewhere in Pennsylvania?

      By the way, run Google searches also. My resume is on a website (run entirely with open-source tools), and NOT on Monster, as their "quick and easy post-your-resume'o'

  • Advertising for Perl Jobs is simple (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:14PM (#15822297)
    jobs.perl.org [perl.org] is absolutely the first stop for the Perl subset of open source hiring, both for programmer types and sysadmin types.

    • Amen! I've found plenty of great people through that and I, in turn, have picked up great jobs through it. Fortunately the quality of jobs listed there is often very high and Perl programmers who really have a clue pay attention to that site, even when they're not looking for work. It's a great way to spot trends.

  • Craigslist (Score:2, Informative)

    by Duhavid ( 677874 )
    Craigslist

  • Try your local LUG (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yonder Way ( 603108 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:19PM (#15822323)
    Most local Linux User Groups welcome local companies that want to hire Linux talent. One of the most effective ways at our local LUG is to buy pizza for the meeting, and then you've got a captive audience of around 100 talented Linux geeks listening to you talk about your company for a few minutes and giving you a great opportunity to fish for resumes. And if you want to go completely cheap, they will usually let you advertise local Linux jobs on their general discussion mailing lists.
    • You may also find local chapters of special interest groups, like Perlmongers. I've generally been happy to see job postings from real employers on the lists I subscribe to. What I can't abide, though, is postings that don't give any information about the particulars of the job, or when the sender is simply looking to collect resumes to pad his portfolio of "talent".

  • Where? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ohreally_factor ( 593551 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:22PM (#15822335) Journal
    How about in your .sig for starters?

  • Almost doesn't seem to matter (Score:3, Funny)

    by carpeweb ( 949895 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:24PM (#15822348) Journal
    OK, I'll risk negative karma by going tangentially off-topic.

    A start-up with 1000s of machines?

    Regardless of where you advertise (this post was a decent start, but check out the other OSTG sites; plus, Google linux jobs for lots of other sites), make sure you screen every candidate to see which one has the best current job. Before you hire that candidate, make sure you have a shot at filling that vacant position. In other words, start looking for where you're going to land when this one crashes. Also, get an ebay account so that you can dump all the Herman Miller chairs and foosball tables when that's all you have left. And party like it's 1999.

  • You could try.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:27PM (#15822357) Homepage
    http://vger.kernel.org/ [kernel.org]

    You'd have to post it as a lament though.

    Man, I wish I could find some programmers as good as you guys for my positions starting at $95k with full medical and dental. It's amazing how many people turn down our 401k and stock option program, especially with the incredible opportunities for advancement.

    Anyway, you make a good point about user mode autodetect with the current situation, although I still think in-kernel autodetect should be the goal.

  • University ? (Score:2, Informative)

    by dYnkYn ( 992384 )
    You can submit some job opportunites on the dedicated tool (here named Job Bourse) of most of universities having an IT department. For example:
  • I know I can't be the only one that searches through craigslist for everything.

    You know, myspace has a lot of traffic too now that I think about it.
    • Advertising on myspace will just get you post-ironic goths and hipsters. Is that what you really want? Really?

    • Re:Craigslist ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by vinsanity1 ( 978226 )
      i'd agree myspace gets a lot of traffic, but my guess is about 60% of it is girls in their early teens, and about 30% is goths.
      probably not a very good place to advertise employment at all, let alone this particular job.
      • i'd agree myspace gets a lot of traffic, but my guess is about 60% of it is girls in their early teens, and about 30% is goths.

        Geez, way to generalize, buddy.

        Girls in their late teens have got to make up at least 20%.
  • Well, as you're asking on slashdot, there just happens to be these lovely red banner ads. They all seem to mention "Dice." So I'd give dice.com a looksee. But, maybe give Slashdot some revenue, and click thru the advert.
    • I no longer work in the IT industry, however, I still have my resume up on dice.com. I still get a lot of inquiries (10-15 a week), but NONE are from direct hire employers. They are all recruiters. A nd if you look at the actual job descriptions, all these different recruiters are vying to fill the same position.

      Nevermind the fact that these recruiters routinely disregard location and travel preference.

      It comes down to recruiters searching on hot keywords (such as linux clusters), and mass-emailing t

      • Dice is simply the best. Well, THE best is a recruiter who supplies you with the royalty treatment, but you have to work a tad for that.

        Seriously, though, you DO realize that what you are complaining about is the sign of a healthy, free market job board? Of course you get spammed. How exactly are you going to have a large job board and not get spammed? The best you can do is with a Social Network approach, but even that can be rigged.

        I personally find the spam of use - it lets me know what agents to avo

    • NOOOOOOOOO! You told people to click the ads! Google will cancel our AdSense account! The end is nigh!!!

  • Development mailing list (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:54PM (#15822472)
    The development mailing list for the project(s) you plan on using. I guess, in your case, that would MPI or something Beowulf-related.

    Have you thought about directly approaching some of the brilliant developpers working on these projects, anyway ? A job opportunity does not have to be advertised if you can fill it by networking inside the community.

  • USENIX / SAGE / LOPSA (Score:4, Informative)

    by jsellens ( 760992 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @10:58PM (#15822487) Homepage

    I might guess that most USENIX [usenix.org], SAGE [sage.org] and LOPSA [lopsa.org] members are well versed in open source tools.

    You could try the respective jobs boards:

  • What is the purpose of the cluster? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bender0x7D1 ( 536254 ) on Monday July 31, 2006 @11:08PM (#15822522)
    Without knowing more about the purpose of the cluster, it is a hard question to answer. The best place to post/look/advertise probably isn't one of the one-stop, post all your job sites. Try to determine what skillset is specifically required for your job and start looking at related sites.

    Also, you might want to reconsider what you are looking for. If you really want a single "IT maven" to design and run the cluster, you are setting yourself up for failure. With that many machines, just swapping out failed hardware approaches a full-time job, so your maven better have a lot of good help.
  • Cheap to advertise and apparently very popular:
    http://www.gumtree.com/index_posting_jobs_landing. html [gumtree.com]
    http://www.gumtree.com/ [gumtree.com] (Find other gumtree and kijiji sites around the world)

  • How solid is the business plan? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rubinson ( 207525 ) <rubinson @ e m a i l.arizona.edu> on Monday July 31, 2006 @11:24PM (#15822573) Homepage
    Something sounds a bit off here. You say that your company is "fully plugged into the open source philosophy," yet nobody is active or well known enough in your local Unix/development communities to know where to find help? Why do you want "to build this cluster using only open source tools" anyway? How do you know that a proprietary solution wouldn't be more cost effective? Even if you're committed to using free software tools for moral reasons (something that I'm not opposed to), what's the cost/benefit versus proprietary solutions?
  • . . . because then I would know where to post my resume, lol. Here's a snippet from my resume that has been on PA Careerlink for about 5 years, with never a single job offer.

    I can deploy advanced office software suites on Linux systems and can then lock down the systems down to make highly secure and robust workstations. I have experience working on shared projects using CVS and Subversion release systems. I can write functional code using most of the standard Linux and Unix development tools. I can also

    • your problems (Score:4, Insightful)

      by r00t ( 33219 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @12:48AM (#15822955) Journal
      First, you used PA Careerlink.

      Second, you left your resume sitting there. You need to direct it toward suitable matches.

      Third, you OWN A HOME without having the finances to back it up. Yeah, it's a better deal if you can sit there for many years and pay the higher rates, but you're in no shape for either. Don't bother unless there are plenty of good-paying jobs for you within about a 7-mile radius.

      Fourth, it appears you don't understand the concept of keywords. (though I only see a part of your resume) Your resume is wordy, yet lacking. Most of us take "functional code" to mean either that your code barely runs or that you use screwball academic languages like Haskell and Scheme. CVS is a revision control system, not a release system. You claim "cross platform", but never mention "portable" or "porting".

      Fifth... you live in PA. You probably need to move. Find some place cheap that is near a good tech area. Example: Lowell, MA.

      • You're right! Actually I am moving (obviously). However I'm pursuing a mechanical engineering job rather than a programmer job at the moment. I never said I was a programmer, just that I had that kind of stuff on my resume for the last 5 years on a statewide job board and nobody ever seemed to notice it or ever called me about a potential job.

        I have some excellent prospects lined up in the near future, so not to worry about my grumping. I have run everything into the ground by plan to get my wife through c

        • She'll leave you.

          Better would have been to have her drop out. Mine did. I now have 5 kids, hot meals, clean clothes...

          You don't get the hot meals and clean clothes if she has her own career. Well, you might get them, but that's unfair and she WILL notice that she's doing twice as much work as you are. Splitting the chores is impossible because you WILL NOT have the same standards. What is clean to you may not be clean to her, so she ends up doing all the cleaning and gets resentful because you agreed to do
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • Actually, my wife (then girlfriend) volunteered after spending lots of time visiting a few of her friends who are happy stay-at-home moms. I'd never push someone into that; I'd try my best to avoid them in the first place. I've seen enough fractured families to see how it goes.

              Both are capable.

              You could swap roles. That can work, though you'll have difficulty breastfeeding. It's not a given that the lady has to be the homemaker, though most people find this to be more natural. In two out of three cases I'm
              • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                • I'm sure it's not difficult right now. Only the truly insane can't keep a marriage together for a few years at least. Most people manage to keep it happy for a few years, then fairly decent for a few more.

                  See if you last a decade.

                  Supposing you do, see how you feel about the work/leisure split after 4 or 5 decades.

                  I never heard anybody old say "I wish I'd spent less time with my family." Think you'll say that?

                  One of the saddest things I ever saw was a coworker receiving his kids for the weekend.

                  BTW, separate
  • The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) is a good place to meet open source types. If you have money, buy a booth in the exhibit hall; if not, show up and tack your info up on the job board (they set up a buletin board outside the exhibit hall for this purpose). O'Reilly also has an opt-in e-mailing list for attendees.

    But you just missed it.
  • Keep in mind that the best talent already has jobs [joelonsoftware.com].
    • Interesting, but I thought "deadwood" was the name for people who stayed at the same company forever.

      I'm just kidding, but it's funny that Joel really can't define the qualities of "the best", but he knows they always have work.
  • While I can't answer the posters question, I really hope that someone can give a good answer to this for another reason. I'm a recent graduate, and while I have some experience working on Windows systems, and with Microsoft technology, I'm very interested in finding a development job working on Linux and with the various open source development tools.
    I've gone through most of the "regular" channels in searching for a job (e.g. Monster, Dice, Hotjobs, Career Builder, my school's Career Services department)
  • to Code Snippets. [bigbold.com] :) Blatant ad, I know.
  • I know Linux Questions [linuxquestions.org] just started out with an job market place.
    BTW: I haven't used it myself.

  • The Linux job market is hot here in the Metroplex (Dallas/Fort Worth). When ever I want a new job I will just post to Monster.com and the opportunities will contact me. So, I guess they were searching for keywords as found in my resume.

    My point is: this may be your last resort (whereas pray should have been your first resort :) ) since what you are looking for seems to be in short supply for the near term.

  • Does OSS development require special skills? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ClosedSource ( 238333 ) * on Tuesday August 01, 2006 @09:53AM (#15824520)
    "In response to our ads we see people with industrial experience who know every proprietary product in existence, but almost none who are steeped in open source development"

    It sounds like you're letting your philosphy interfere with your business goals. What specific skills do you believe are unique to Open Source development that people with proprietary product experience lack?

    It seems to me that Open Source is more of a licensing philosphy than a development methodology. Are you developing using a waterfall, CMM, XP, Agile or some other approach? For example if you use XP, proprietary developers who have used it will probably be a better match than open source developers who haven't.
    • Just a quick correction. CMM isn't a development methodology, just like ISO9000... CMM is a way to ensure processes, but it's up to you which ones. And maybe I'm wrong but isn't Agile a part of XP philosophy?

      Maybe he's just worried that those guys don't know CVS, Eclipse framework and so on. I would agree wit you that knowing how to use tools is less important than knowing how to debug deadlocks (which is philosophy-agnostic).
      • "CMM isn't a development methodology, just like ISO9000... CMM is a way to ensure processes, but it's up to you which ones."

        CMM doesn't address low-level details of software development the way XP does, but it still qualifies as a methodology IMHO. For example, to be certified an organization has to have adopted a company-wide software development process that every project follows. Requiring a single process for all projects is a methodological decision.

        "And maybe I'm wrong but isn't Agile a part of XP phi
  • for open source company that just wants to use open source, usually means they wont be able to pay you either! ; )
  • I found my free software job on Idealist.

  • Have a hot job, and no suitable applicants? You review your requirements and the screening process.

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