Hire Open Source Developers
Submitted by Rich Carson on 2010-02-24 02:47 AM
To build a great software team you have to focus on hiring great developers. As a startup company that has grown quickly, we have quite a bit of recent experience with hiring. Across all of the hiring we did, we have noticed that by far the best developers are those that are involved in open source development. Developers who are involved in open source projects generally have a real passion for developing software, keeping up with new technologies, and working with a team towards a common goal. Open source developers tend to be much better coders also. They write more maintainable and easier to test code. They also are usually more likely to advocate unit testing which is a must for any great development team. I could go on for quite awhile about why I think this is the case, but here I just want to say that our experience is based on real experience. Now one of the very first questions that we ask candidates is what their experience is with open source software. While I can't say we absolutely wouldn't hire someone without open source experience, I can say that it is a very significant factor and something that we use to differentiate developers on.