Many companies suffer from a technical talent shortage. Because digital transformation is an existential requirement in nearly every single industry, they all depend on great engineers.
The sourcing and acquisition of high quality engineers has become a mini industry, fueled not only by traditional technical recruiters but by start ups.
The best way to evaluate the quality of an engineer is to see their code and interactions in real life. Contributors to open source have the upper hand in that regard.
Here is what you could actually see based on open source contributions:
- The quality of the code
- The quality of commit comments
- The velocity of delivery
- The quality of communication with others
- The ability to address known requirements or bugs
- The level of intrinsic motivation
What better way to observe and inspect all of this than through open source contributions?
Companies are inevitably going to use open source as a way to reduce the costs of their digital transformation. But to simply acquire without contributing into the system is bad for them. They need to be able to modify and improve upon software in the same way that they benefit from contributions.
The best way to do this is to hire people from the open source community who are good at making contributions and put them to work to use and improve upon those same solutions.
Finding great talent means being able to increase the pipeline of people who can ultimately work. This becomes a talent strategy.
The traditional strategy is just looking and poaching. But what a scarce set. If you want to build proprietary pipeline, you need to be earlier in the funnel and become an advocate.
If you are a giant like Amazon which already can attract the best like Amazon, you could get by. But even they are likely to be aggressive at hiring programmers who have worked on open source projects upon which they have derived their proprietary services.
These big tech leaders will never run out of talent. But the rest of the world better start.
The talent strategy starts with seeding and attracting talent world wide to work on open source strategies. This means funding the training, mentoring, and internships around key projects.
But what if the company has no need to modify existing open source projects, even if it is core to their business?
For example, an automotive company many be using Kafka to stream sensor data. But they have no need to modify Kafka as is. It is fine. They are focused on the proprietary apps.
Will this strategy help?
It won't. But it's asking the wrong question.
Most companies don't open source enough. They circumscribe what is core to their business too broadly.
The automotive company, while needing better software to be more modern, doesn't compete primarily on software. A small proprietary part of the business perhaps. But consumers pick cars based on styling, features, branding, and costs.
While essential to be digitally transformed, software is not core. So why not lower costs and attract great talent at the same time?
How about a technology startup that is building consumer apps in the automotive industry?
So how would it work?
A real talent strategy thinks about pipeline.
After you have evaluated all of the open source projects you depend upon, fund internships globally. This could mean.
But it doesn't end there. Valued and talented developers already working for you should be spending time on these projects and contributing. There are a few benefits for that.
First, once a mentee joins, they will need to work with someone who is also familiar with the project.
Second, being active in the community lets potential hires know about you and your firm. Open source is a community, and the combination of financial and social capital investment matters.