It’s no longer enough to just contribute to open source #
For a long time, the advice was pretty straightforward: contribute to open source, build up a public GitHub profile, and it could help you get hired. It made sense. Your work was public so people could look at the code, see the discussion around it and get some proof that you could contribute to a real project. That can still help but I think the signal is getting a lot weaker. Open source was never purely altruistic. People contribute because they want to learn, fix something they use, meet people, build a resume, etc. Nothing wrong with that. But now it’s much easier to generate something that looks like a legitimate contribution without really understanding the project. Someone can use AI to make a patch, open a PR, and move on. Agents can do that at a much bigger scale. From a maintainer’s perspective that means more time spent figuring out whether a PR is actually useful, whether it breaks something subtle or whether the person submitting it understands any of the code they touched. It also makes GitHub profiles harder to read. Having a bunch of contributions doesn’t automatically tell you much anymore. There’s also a weird incentive now to treat a public GitHub profile like personal branding. Some people are clearly optimizing for looking helpful, active, and “good for open source” rather than actually being useful to the project. A long list of PRs can look impressive from a distance but it doesn’t always say much about whether someone made maintainers’ lives easier or just created more work for them. So I think the useful signal has shifted from “look, I have open-source contributions” to “I can work with other people on a real codebase and be trusted with responsibility.” That’s a much harder thing to demonstrate, especially if you’re new. But it’s probably the kind of contribution that still actually matters.