It was June when I was interviewed by opensource.com for my Opensource (FOSS) journey and Summer training in Dgplug.
https://opensource.com/life/16/6/how-community-taught-me-code
Heartfelt Thanks to my family, mentors and friends I have come across so far!
Definitely a moment that I would love to cherish for lifelong :).
Contributions: https://github.com/trishnaguha https://pagure.io/user/trishnag
Job interview is a heavy weight term specially for a fresher. Being a fresher myself, I can realize that. Shakthi Kannan aka mbuf has made the term quite lighter with a guest session we had in dgplug on last Sunday. I will write in brief of what I learnt.
Usually there are two types of companies in the industry we see such as Cathedral model and bazaar model.
Cathedral style of work known as MNCs in India follow a strict hierarchy structure. Here we will have to follow what my Manager says. After the work we will report to my Manager, he/she will report to another Manager or Head who will report to a Vice President and so on. We may be unable to know what other departments and divisions are working on, there may be restriction of code access and physical building access too.
Bazaar style of work known as Start-ups have a flat structure. Start-ups with small number of employees are pretty transparent and open in communication. Sometimes it is required to work us on different job roles in Start-ups that doesn’t generally happen for MNCs.
And another thing I’ve learnt that there is no such term like “Job Security”, even a CEO or CTO can be replaced or fired if the authority wants. Most people like to work in larger companies because they think it is their “Job Security”. I would love to quote what mbuf said what actually job security is, “they can be relaxed at times (“sitting in the bench”) and not work actively in a project and still earn money”. We have to love what we are doing, rest will go on automatically.
Coming to Job interview, mbuf explained us so well about the Dos and Don’ts for a job interview. He gave us some tips which can make our stress less. Before applying for a job role we should find out what our interest is. If we see a job role interesting, find what skills do we need for it, we should work on acquiring them accordingly for an interview. We can also show our impact by showing our contributions for a project. If you has already worked on F/OSS project you can show your patches or codes as contribution in github or as any other source as proof in the technical interview. We should not ask how we fared in the interview. That’s the most important thing I have learnt from this session. Many of dgplug folks did the same mistake in their interview, they asked how they fared in the interview, thus couldn’t make it.
We had a great evening session in dgplug on preparing job interviews and also discussing careers and job opportunities for people working with Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) . It had been a bright Sunday 🙂
Trishna Guha 