Comment by lhorie

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.