Communications of the ACM
Open Source Career Opportunities Continue to Abound
Credit: CIO
Despite an uncertain environment for some IT hiring, open source jobs remain a consistent source of career growth for technology professionals. Now, with technologies such as the cloud, social media, big data, software-as-a-service, and mobile all maturing so rapidly, it makes more sense for companies to leverage the open source community effort to accelerate development and deployment. Having a community of developers devoted to improving the code and continually adding functionality can help businesses shorten the adoption cycle and more quickly leverage new and emerging technologies to their benefit.
Whatever industry you're in, if you're an open source developer, it seems the market's wide open. Programming languages are certainly one aspect that remains in demand, but search technology, the cloud, big data, and security are also popular. Many companies use open source technologies to not only accelerate technology development, but also to get around exorbitant licensing costs. For organizations with more than about 20 or so servers, it's much more cost-effective to hire skilled open source developers and pay for their expertise than to pay for proprietary software licenses. Companies are also using open source to write customized code that works to connect homegrown applications and database management solutions to legacy applications.
It's not just traditional technology companies hiring for open source positions. The demand for open source skills has expanded into other firms not traditionally thought of as tech-savvy. Open source skills are expanding quite a bit out of specifically technology companies into other, non-tech firms. Mostly, these big firms are looking for people with skills related to big data — to take their huge data streams and analyze them — and related to the cloud and related services technology.
From CIO
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