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And I am not talking about the choice to wear a tie-died tshirt or look like Johnny Damon.

The most important thing I am doing at the moment is hiring the person to lead our technology development. I am meeting many great people doing so. Now, I used to be a developer and my degree at University was meant to help make me a better one. But the truth is I wasn’t a very good one. I got great marks, but I don’t think I was a good developer. Instead, I was very lucky to meet an exceptional developer.

I can’t hire Mike because he is running a fast growing software company, so I thought about what made him a good developer versus a bad one. I don’t think that Mike is a good developer because he contributes to open source projects, but you can tell that he is one from his contributions.

And with that, it brings me back to the title of the post.  Open source developers care that people would use their products and that software problems get solved. That is a tremendous mindset for any employee.

Just like it says a lot about an executive whose profession depends on credibility to have a blog, it says a lot about a developer if they contribute to open source projects. Here are the most important things it says:

• They care enough to do something about a problem. He or she has invested time, most likely not in the hours of 9am to 5pm, to solve an "itch" in the software world. This means they have an above average level of passion for software development.
• They get things done. If they are a contributor, they have proactively ensured that the component they have contributed is accepted among a wide unstructured group of constituents, who have no financial incentive to see it accepted. This in itself is a fantastic indication of how productive they would be to work with.
• They care about customers. The community aspect of open source development is one of the most telling. Like Craig of Craigslist, open source contributors tend to have a passion for customer service. This is the single best thing to see. They care that people use their software and that their software works for those people. Also, open source projects tend to develop over time according to customer demand. That is a great product development mindset to follow: listen to your customers problems, prioritize them and then come up with innovative solutions that solves as many as possible in an as-generic-as-can-be way. They might say they do this because they are lazy, but in fact that is the essence of all great design.

All this adds up to the best kind of resume a prospective employer can see. In economics there is the concept of observed data versus self-reported data. Economists put a lot more weight in observed data. People can tell you they will buy a product but the most important thing to know is that they did buy it.

In essence, open source developers have observed resumes. The self-reported resumes that come as a consequence of Monster job ads are in comparison considerably less valuable. As open source software development gains greater pace, more developers will have observed resumes. That’s a pretty big deal.

And with that, if you are a developer reading this who cares about search technology and ways to intelligently crawl the web, I’d love to hire you. If you’re not, maybe you know somebody that is. Just drop me an email at niki.scevak at gmail dot com.