In the summer of 2023, I applied for a backend engineering role at a company I genuinely wanted to work at. On paper I was under-qualified: they wanted five years of experience and I had three, they wanted specific experience with their tech stack that I didn't fully have, and their interview process was known to be competitive.

I got the job. I'm pretty sure I know why.

The Background

About a year before applying, I'd started contributing to an open source API framework that I was using in my own projects. The framework was moderately well-known — a few thousand GitHub stars — and had some persistent issues around error handling that I'd run into and cared about enough to fix.

My first contribution was small: improving an error message to include more context. Then I fixed a related bug. Then I added a feature that addressed a commonly-requested issue. Over about six months, I'd made maybe fifteen commits to the project and become one of the more active contributors that quarter.

What Happened in the Interview

In the technical interview, the interviewer looked at my GitHub profile before we started. Two of my commits to the framework were in a codebase he was familiar with. He'd seen the issues I'd fixed. We spent 20 minutes talking about the architecture decisions behind one of my changes and the tradeoffs involved.

That conversation was better evidence of my technical thinking than any whiteboard problem could have been. We were talking about real code I'd written for a real system, discussing the actual technical tradeoffs with someone who understood the domain. The gap between "three years experience" and "five years experience" disappeared into irrelevance.

What Open Source Actually Signals to Employers

It signals that you write code when you're not being paid to, which implies you actually care about it. It shows how you communicate technically in written form — commit messages, PR descriptions, issue comments — which is how most software engineering communication actually happens in remote teams. And it provides verifiable evidence of your work, which is more credible than anything you can self-report on a resume.

A Realistic Note

Open source contributions are not a magic shortcut. They helped me specifically because they were in a domain relevant to the role. Random contributions to unrelated projects don't carry the same weight. Focus your contributions on areas close to the work you want to do, and do them with enough care that the work speaks clearly for itself.