Your comment and (as of this comment, anyway) the thread of replies is one reason why I think using a person's opensource contributions as part of an evaluation of their suitability for employment is a bit ridiculous. There is a whole range of completely arbitrary and subjective "measures" around such contributions, and they end up being no better filters than any of the other (flawed) filters people use to evaluate such things these days.

It may have held (marginally greater) value at some point, but at this point it is just another bullet point clueless HR managers and petty managers can stick next to the "alphabet soup" in their job descriptions.

This is overly cynical. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, and simply not a data point if a candidate lacks one.

That's overly charitable. It can be a meaningful positive indicator, but only the same way that any other work experience can be. Compare that with the proliferation of requirements for experience in specific languages rather than for specific (but more general) engineering ability, and I think my cynical take isn't overly cynical at all.

On the other hand, people use open source to market themselves to promote their talks, books and consultancy gigs. You have to accept the negative sides of that as well. People will start to question the motivations of your contributions. People will be annoyed when the code you promoted has faults in it. Once you are doing things for commercial gain then people's attitudes towards you will shift. That seems inevitable.

>they want all opensourced stuff to be polished

That would be nice though.

Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done?

This would be ideal, but in my experience evaluating some open source libraries, they were clearly works in progress or abandoned. I think people had good intentions when putting the stuff out there.

Maybe because github is free for public open source, stuff gets put out there before its polished?

> Why would you release something to the public and put your name on it if it's lazily done?

No software is perfect. It has either no features in it or has bugs. The assholes will either demand to get the missing features added or the bugs fixed.

Isn't the whole point of Open Sourcing your stuff, is so that others can contribute to it if they so desire?

Whether or not something is "lazily done" is besides the point. The point is - they produced _something_, and the consumer did not. If you see something which you think could be done in a better way, wouldn't a better use of your time be spent issuing a pull request with your suggested improvement, rather than whining that "it was lazily done" ?