Comment by lhorie
4 years ago
Anecdata, but after I released Mithril.js, I started getting contacted by recruiters from Bay Area companies. I now make 4 times as much as I did when I first started working on it. I know of other folks that got poached by high tech companies due to growing prominence in open source.
FWIW, my experience reflects GP that people really appreciate someone who takes the time to teach/help others. YMMV.
Working on OSS and working for high tech companies are two things that are diametrically opposite. The latter is not a reward for the former, unless you were only ever writing OSS to pad your resume.
In my experience, it's not an either-or thing. I started my project to scratch an itch and only released it because I thought it could be useful to others. It originally didn't occur to me at all that my side project might influence my own career. But turns out that having a lot of stars on github attracts the attention of recruiters who use bot-based tooling to find talent and hitting HN front page attracts lurker employers. Getting stars is correlated with usefulness, and good docs correlate w/ usefulness as well. There doesn't need to be a direct causation relationship or even any specific intent, all that matters is what actually ends up happening when multiple correlations interplay.
Also, you can write open source software in big tech companies and even be paid to do it (React core team is a good example). TC39 folks spending time moving the Ecmascript standard forward is another example of staff/principal engineers doing citizenship-oriented work in order to get recognition for impact at FANG L6+. Being snarky about it doesn't change the fact that these sorts of symbiosis exist.
And it's very well deserved, Mithril is amazing!
I never had a really successful OSS project but I have a few friends who had or were maintainers of successful projects.
One got poached by FB, another one is a contractor at a higher than average rate.
Was your original salary at the average market rate?