So I’ve been poked a couple of times here at Summit concerning how potential employers can reach out to members of the Fedora community for specific roles they are hiring for that intersect with linux and open source.
Do we have anything like that in this discussion forum? And if we don’t maybe we should talk about adding one and what that would look like to be effective.
I did talk to some people about historically why this doesn’t seem to be a cultural norm, to advertise postings in the Fedora community… and it seems that early on it just wasn’t done because Red Hat wanted to let the community be as vendor neutral as possible, so they didn’t make a habit of doing it…and being the only vendor doing it.
But I think 20 years later, maybe its time to have a vendor-neutral jobs board or something in our community space so all employers looking for Linux and open source expertise can reach out to community members for career opportunities.
I mean obviously I don’t want something like that to be a dumping ground for random recruiters; I want it to be something where people in our community can reach out with opportunities they think are relevant to their peers. So we probably need to talk about it a little bit, but I also don’t want to over think it either. Can we experiment with a new category or subcategory somewhere?
We don’t have anything. We also don’t have a place for people to advertise that they offer services on Fedora either. It has been an uncomfortable topic to bring up historically, but I think it’d be nice if we did have a space for people in the community to advertise opportunities and services.
I also like this idea. We had a packaging position open last year that took a while to fill and I definitely would have posted about it if there was a place for such things.
Would there be any standard formatting or other requirements for things like location, remote-ability etc.? Would there be standards of how “Fedora related” the postings would have to be?
I imagine that requirements like that could be added later if needed/wanted but I also think that it would have to be moderated to a point so that it doesn’t become spam and listings get updated when filled/closed.
Offering services is more complicated, as there will be an assumption that Fedora supports and endorses those services.
For example, say we put an advertisment up for a domain registrar that is community owned and reinvests their profits into services and maintains low prices - but then they sell to a say company that runs property investment, and jacks up their prices.
Therfore I would agree with Jef and push only for a job board at this time.
When this has come up in the past there have been several problems:
Legal brought up objections about the fact that Fedora is legally a Red Hat owned, sponsored and operated organization so this is ‘Red Hat’ operating a jobs board. That runs into all kinds of legal issues with states, provinces, countries, etc. [which leads to 2]
Jobs boards need constant moderation because there are a lot of skeazy organizations who ‘drop’ a lot of non-existent jobs to do anything from trolling, resume building, various criminal activities, etc. People who had operated/moderated boards in the past found it exhausting because some of the criminal groups try to be ‘extra persuasive’ at times.
Various members of the community at past times did not want to see this sort of thing and were vocal about it.
Number 3 is a thing which comes and goes. Number 1 and 2 are pretty constant and have to be dealt with carefully. They also tie into each other.. where if we have ‘skeazy’ jobs it is not a ‘community’ problem but a Red Hat problem etc.