When I first wanted to get into the world of coding, I used to wonder what kinds of things I could do to get some active working experience in developing software, rather than just toy programming examples and simple personal utilities. I tried to take my degree and look for entry level posts.
I was always told the same thing - I was already supposed to have been contributing to open source projects and have learned this stuff already. I was supposed to bring a portfolio of my existing work with me to these interviews and to be able to explain how these open web stacks worked and what I’d contributed to those projects.
In effect, they were telling me that I hadn’t done my internship yet, and to come back when I had. Needless to say, without months of unpaid time to afford on this, I swiftly changed track and decided to take my lazy girl librarian job instead, using my knowledge as needed to massively outperform expectations without ever really crossing the divide or earning anywhere near what I could be doing. So much for a uni computer science degree opening doors.
Open source project development is an interesting opportunity to contribute and learn about valuable technologies, but it’s quite correct that it is starting to become more regimented, just as the wider culture is shifting away from unpaid labour in general. Private industries exploit open source in multiple ways, but taken as a whole it is a huge industry racket designed to offload the costs of training to be an actual engineer off onto unpaid hours. This is both bad for the industry and unreliable for the end products, and professionalisation is long overdue.
