Re:The GitHub Job Interview
by assaf_lavie on Tuesday January 10, 2012 @05:19AM
(#3446433)
It's true that you'll have more impact by contributing to a well-known project, but on the other hand the range of activities you can take part in is limited. Well-established projects usually don't call for high-level design activities - the sort that a tech co-founder would need to do. They're more about contributing patches and perhaps a new feature (after you've learned the project, which is usually quite big). Ultimately I think you get the same amount of karma if you work on a pet project and not a well-established one. And there's absolutely no reason why the company's sandbox project can't fill a real need and become popular with time.
It doesn't matter that it's open source if you're not going to use it and no-one else apart from them is (a very real possibility).
In essence, I'd happily agree with the article after changing this:
> "You come up with a cool idea of an open-source project"
with this:
> "You find a _popular_ open-source project"
Now you can be certain (not just optimistic) that the wider community will benefit from your work.
(edit: I'm thinking along the lines of jQuery, backbone.js, nodejs, django, memcached, sqlite, Nginx, Hadoop, Linux, ..., not some dev's/company's lonely github project)