I'm a big advocate of learning on the battlefield. And that certainly includes what may be the most epic battle of them all: open source software.

Contribute to an open-source project. There are thousands, so pick whatever strikes your fancy. But pick one and really dig in, become an active contributor. Absolutely nothing is more practical, more real, than working collaboratively with software developers all over the globe from all walks of life.

If you're looking to polish your programming chops, what could possibly be better, more job-worthy experience than immersing yourself in a real live open source software project? There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, and a few of them have arguably changed the world.

Unfortunately, that wasn't what happened for one particular open source developer. In an anonymous email to me, he related his experiences:

I'm a programmer with 14 years of experience both inside academics and in commercial industry currently looking for work. In both my cover letters and my resume I indicate that I am the architect of a couple of open source Java projects where the code, design and applications were available on the web.

One company seemed impressed with my enthusiasm for the job but it was part of their policy to provide coding tests. This seemed perfectly reasonable and I did it by using the first solution I thought about. When I got to the phone interview, the guy spent about five minutes telling me how inefficient my coding solution was and that they were not very impressed. Then I asked whether he had looked at the open source projects I mentioned. He said no - but it seems his impression was already set based on my performance in the coding test. The coding test did not indicate what criteria they were using for evaluation but my solution seemed to kill the interview.

In another call, I was talking with a recruiter who was trying to place someone for a contract Java development assignment. I told her that most of my recent work was open source and that she could inspect it if she wanted to assess my technical competence. Five minutes later she phoned back and said I appeared to lack any recent commercial experience. I had demonstrable open source applications that used the technologies they wanted, but it didn't appear to matter.

With yet another recruiter I told him that even years ago when I had worked on commercial projects, before I went back to school, the proprietary nature of my jobs prevented me from mentioning the specifics about a lot of what I did. The badge of commercial software experience didn't necessarily prove either my technical competence or my relative contribution to the projects. What my experience of working in industry long ago did teach me was how to fill out a time sheet and estimate time for deliverables. But this experience would seem a bit dated now for recruiters.

That's a terrible interview track record for the open source experience that I advocated so strongly. He continues:

I think it's important that I try to see their point of view. A lot of open source projects are probably poorly written and made in response to a neat idea rather than to requirements from some user community. In academia, the goal for development is often more about publishing papers than establishing a user base. Industry people sometimes have the view (sometimes justified and sometimes not) that open source developers who emerge from academic projects lack practical skills. I don't necessarily claim my open source code is the best in the world but it works, it's documented and it's available for scrutiny. One of the reasons I worked so hard on open source projects was to make job interviews easier. By providing prospective employers with large samples of publically available working code, I thought I would give them something more useful to think about than my performance on a particular coding test or whether the acronyms in the job skills matched my "years spent". I am very aware of the hype behind open source. I've heard it, lived it and even spun some of it myself. But sometimes it's good to take a sobering reality check -- is open-source experience overrated?

It's disheartening to hear so many prospective employers completely disregard experience on open source projects. It's a part of your programming portfolio, and any company not even willing to take a cursory look at your portfolio before interviewing you is already suspect. This reflects poorly on the employers. I'm not sure I'd want to work at a place where a programmers' prior body of work is treated as inconsequential.

On the other hand, perhaps the choice of open source project matters almost as much as the programming itself. How many open source projects labor away in utter obscurity, solving problems that nobody cares about, problems so incredibly narrow that the authors are the only possible beneficiaries? Just as commercial software can't possibly exist without customers, perhaps open source experience is only valid if you work on a project that attains some moderate level of critical mass and user base. Remember, shipping isn't enough. Open source or not, if you aren't building software that someone finds useful, if you aren't convincing at least a small audience of programmers that your project is worthwhile enough to join --

Then what are you really doing?