assaf_lavie

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.

Context is true. It's totally different to see someone work _with you_ on a project than to rummage around their commits to project you don't really know. The point is to see how it is to collaborate with someone, and that has to be a first-person experience (or take the word of someone you really value, but that's not what you get form random GitHub projects). And also there are tons of developers who never really contributed much to open source. e.g. in the Microsoft world this is not so rare, and you'll miss these people if you _require_ a GitHub reference...

In some countries this information turns up when you do your taxes for the end of the year. And not all job markets are as huge and "anonymous" as the U.S. job market - some (like Israel) are relatively small (a few 10ks of programmers probably) and word gets around. Besides, if you get asked on an interview about what you've done in the recent past in terms of looking for work you're basically lying if you're not mentioning a brief period of employment. Not a huge deal, but still it's not honest and some people would rather not.

That's why it should be a cool, fun project. It's hard for me to see how one might get exploited by contributing as much time as he wants to an open-source project. Remember, the prospective employee uses the same experience to gauge what it's like to work with his prospective employer.