Today I want to share a few insights as a hiring manager for Open Source engineering roles. But first a story.
More than a decade ago Red Hat began looking into whether ARM Servers could be a real thing (Spoiler: yes). Part of that investigation meant going to a number of conferences where ARM + Linux were the unifying interest that brought all participants together. When I first went to one of these things I met the most interesting people. And then a second event… Wow, some of those same people were there too! Their employer sent them everywhere so I got to know them, their lives, their technology interests, and what they were doing for their company.
Conference after conference, year after year, these same people were still working on these same topics, things like new hardware enablement, high speed network offload engines, bootloader standards, bizdev - you name it. Even though they were working on the same thing, their employers kept changing. Sometimes they worked for OEMs like Dell & HP, other times semiconductors like Qualcomm and AMD, and other times bedrock orgs like Linaro and ARM themselves. And, of course, OS vendors like Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE had people there too. Each person, irrespective of employer, contributed essential ingredients to make ARM + Linux an exceptionally capable combination. And because the software side was Open Source, everybody shared in the advantages of the collective output of all these contributors.
While it was by no means perfect, this aspect was a lovely experience compared to the zero-sum game we’re often faced with in the world. Employers needed the end results these people focused on, and by paying them, they got the results they needed faster. Employees got to focus on technology problems that interested them while making a living and lifelong friends in the process. We all got a better kernel, developer tools, and hardware, too. The reality is that this experience was not an anomaly- if you take the cross section of 2 or 3 major technology planes, the intersecting community is a relatively small group of people who work well together, and rely on each other to succeed.
In Fedora, in Linux distribution communities in general, we are a collective of these niche cross-sections. This is powerful. As a manager at Red Hat, every year I read more resumes than Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and that power goes untapped. It’s just astonishing how little attention community involvement is mentioned. Education? Sure. Employment history? Plenty, often too much. Areas of technical skill? Of course! Years or decades in Open Source communities, as a user or the many forms of contributor? Hardly mentioned. It’s astonishing to me that people don’t think to talk about their experience in this space and don’t know their own rare value. Distributions are a nexus of myriad specializations. Please, everybody, put your open source career in your CV, just like you would your employment history. It’s often the most important part, even if you didn’t get paid for it. Your demonstrated ability to work with other members of these global communities will help you stand out.
So far this year in CLE a new SysAdmin has joined Infrastructure and we have a RISC-V Lead joining Fedora Quality in March. We are still interviewing for a new Fedora Project Leader as well as a Senior QE. It won’t surprise anybody to know that well qualified FPL candidates need to have a strong community background, but what about QE? Participation can be the differentiating factor between a good candidate and a great candidate. Even if that experience is as modest as “Used $DISTRO for $X years, had problems, filed issues, worked on them to resolution”, it’s so meaningful. This hypothetical example tells me they know how to use a distribution (many don’t), they reported issues (many don’t), they followed up (many don’t). If you’re reading this the odds are you’ve done all of these things and far more. You, my fellow Fedora users and contributors, are rare gems.
Closing this out, if you have questions about hiring at Red Hat, or want tips to burnish your Open Source resume wherever you’re applying, feel free to comment and question below. While I probably can’t make time to review another 154 CVs, I’d like to do what I can to help you succeed in a career that supports Open Source. This isn’t high minded idealism, it’s a simple recognition that when we work upstream, we share the benefit together.
