Hello folks, How important are open-source contributions / personal projects for landing a remote job? I understand that it helps if someone else can look at my code but just wondering if not having it is a deal breaker. Would applying to jobs without meaningful contributions on my Github profile lead to any success? To provide some context, I like to work as a developer but I have other interests that I pursue in my free time. Hence, I do not have enough motivation to work on side-projects. For the longest time, I have not applied for a new job because of this reason. Was wondering if side projects are as critical as I have assumed them to be.

These are nice to have. Definitely not critical.

Depending how new you are to the market For experienced devs I would say it's a good plus one For some one new it could matter more, because that will show doing practice and extra curricular efforts, it might give them an edge over other candidates if they have a good contribution history

We internally use a tool to source strong relevant Github profiles for hiring 🙂

@many-intern-37109 I'm curious what metrics are used.

Stars of the projects they have contributed to or built, topics of the projects, etc

it's nice to have but not critical.

@limited-cartoon-72739 as everyone has said, it is a bonus. Not a deal breaker. Don't let that stop you. Some of the best programmers I have worked with had lives outside code and had 0 open source contributions. Basically I would go far as to say that unless you have a super hot OS project or you are part of some major framework team, it won't swing your outcome either ways.

For experienced candidates it has added value. I have a fairly complex data viewer project which gained 70 stars and my last interviewer was very keenly interested in it. As a team builder myself, I have a strict criteria to reject junior or mid level profile who doesn't have a decent GitHub profile. This rule of filtering has always helped me get candidates who are really invested in software.

As everyone mentioned OSP and side projects are good to have but it’s not mandatory. Here is my opinion... OSP and side projects are not for everyone. First, it depends on what profile you are applying for. If the profile needs working on OSP or building something in public then having a GitHub profile definitely adds a lot of value. However, they are only a few jobs that do this. If you are interested in OSP just for getting a job then I would not recommend it. Because there are tons of other ways to do it. I usually do OSP for 3 reasons. 1. Enhanced my skill outside my day-to-day job. 2. Teaching and communication. 3. Community. As a by-product of this, it builds my portfolio. Not the other way around. For example, one of the projects got me an opportunity to give a talk at droidconBerlin. I got my current job offer because of GitHub. The employer reach out to me by the email I mentioned on my GitHub, where He liked one of the projects I build, which was one of the core features of the product they were building. I did not even share my resume. Hiring is tough. So people try to get as much info out of the candidate. Github projects are one of the closest things we do in our day-to-day job. i.e coding. For more senior people 8+ years of experience, this might not help much. I somewhat disagree with @loud-glass-33663 last statement. Any kind of contribution can help. The project which my employer saw was just a basic app and was not a contribution to any other project or framework.

I have a different approach which has worked for me. My experience agree with what @loud-glass-33663 said. What I instead do is. I have a coding assignment type project which involved real world code with high level of complexity. Pretty much what coding assignment tests are. This serves as a proof that your coding skills are good. Open source returns aren't linear.

I don't think it's necessary and if finding jobs is the only reason you're doing it, then your time is better spent improving your l33tcode. But on the other hand I have got my current work because of my high participation in OSS. My current employer is also huge on OSS and so I actually get paid to do a quite a lot of OSS work too. We constantly try to open our internal tools, and even extract out stuff from what we build for clients. But the thing is I love using and building oss, I never forced myself to do it. It's something I just do anyways. A few months back I also got funded on one of my projects which was super cool.