Open source is a great tool to attract the best developers

One of the things I tell my clients every day is that open source is a fantastic way to get the best developers on the planet working for you? Why? Because the best developers love contributing to open source projects that they use!

As a result, when you hire such a developer, you get somebody who is instantly productive on the project you are hiring them to work with in your organization.

Organizations in every market, and geography, have been known to do that… Some are more obvious than others. Some less.

If you ever attend a conference like the amazing All Things Open you will usually see a booth from Disney Tech. Who do they have on the booth? HR people talking about projects, jobs, and presenting job postings, and collecting resumes, all while talking about how great Disney Tech is at doing open source.

Other organizations have been leveraging open source to recruit the best talent directly in their published open source strategy.

Société Générale, is a great example. They communicate on their open source strategy which has the 3 items: “Use, Contribute, Attract”. During their 2017 Investor Day, they had a lovely slide 52 in their (publicly available) presentation which details a bit what it means:

Always consider open source first as part of their “Use”. “Contribute” to public projects that they use internally. And “Attract” (and retain) talents. It couldn’t be more obvious.

Another organization (Lloyds Banking Group, also a bank) that clearly talks about open source in very clear terms : “Attracting and retaining talent, because the best developers want to work with the latest open source technologies” in this article (to which I contributed) that details their Open Source Mission team’s role and activities. They also recognize the productivity gains due to the fact that “developers with open source software programming skills can be productive on the day they are hired to work on these same technologies”.

A very recent add to this growing list is one of my current clients, the State Administration of Geneva, their IT services (OCSIN) just published this article describing (it’s in French, sorry) working for OCSIN. It explains the mission to position Geneva as a major player in digital transformation. And to do so, it lists things like creating open source digital citizen platforms, promoting an inclusive and transparent digital society. When doing so it directly points to the (publicly available on their GitHub) open source strategy of the State Administration of Geneva.

These are just examples of how your organization could also be leveraging its open source activities to get the best of the best onboard, working for you, innovating, reducing your time to market, delivering high quality code, growing their skills through sharing knowledge and collaboration.

So are you ready to do so? Want to start communicating about your open source activities in ways developers will relate to? Educate your HR and marketing teams to include open source in their job descriptions, and communications. Talk to your executive teams to help them understand, and embrace the benefits of open source. Come talk to me to help you do this in the most efficient way possible.