A blog post on CIO.com is making the point that participation in an open source project can help kick-start your career. I often find that individual developers like to work on open source projects, since it is fun and even ‘cool’. The ability to get peer recognition and immediate feedback can be a great motivator.
Howewer, I had not thought about the aspect of corporate career progression. Does anyone have good or bad experiences their participation in an open source project helping their career?
Ian Skerrett 
I landed a consulting job once because of some C programming experience I had gained through working on an open source Online Game called CircleMUD. The C programming job was in the Retail business so had nothing to do with gaming, just the type of advanced textual programming I was doing then for the game fit the needs of the client at the time.
Uh, yeah. Count the number of CDT committers who found new career opportunities because they were CDT committers. (at least three, and myself twice).
And there could be more. The demand for Eclipse and CDT expertise is at a high right now. And who better to get than someone already familiar with the code. Anyone looking for work just needs to spend a few weeks helping with the CDT and I’m sure they’d get a call. I talked a budy into doing that and he has a contract on the go.
Not only is this how I have gotten all my work for the last 3 years, I tend to not hire people unless I know them through open source. The benefits as a potential hirer are great – not only do you get to see their code, you get to see how they interact with people and how self driven they are.
Well, I got my current job because I am a committer for some open source projects. There certainly has to be some focus though. In other words, being a committer for a modeling related project does not help to get a job in an XML company.
On the whole, yes.
Yes.