Re:I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee
by berdario on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:43PM
(#7756385)
I have had mostly the same experience.
On the plus side: a lot of companies care about Open Source experience and are able to evaluate it.
On the down side: companies who do it are still the minority, and you'll get a lot of competition from similar folks, who'll likely have written even more open source code than you did, and if they have had a real paid-for work experience will probably be preferred
After leaving the school (I didn't graduate), I spent 2 years doing self-directed learning about computing. I have commit access to PyPy and LLVM, am credited in release notes of Mono and IronPython, and hundreds of open source commits to show off. I still had a lot of trouble landing a job. I got lucky in the end, but it was rough.
You seem to overestimate how open source contributions are judged in job search. Corporate experience is not hearsay; it is concrete. Open source contributions are not concrete, because most employers do not know how to evaluate them.