Both Bon Jovi and seemingly the open source example are for people in very small companies/ teams.

The project may not be the same or succeed without them, but then it isn't about succeeding the same way, it's about transitioning to a new goal/ objective.

While losing grue from the 6k lines that only he knows about is bad, maybe it gets scrapped and they go in a new direction.

No one is immune to change

Oh I never at all meant to say I'm not replaceable, I very much am, there's just no one currently employed who can do the work I do and the project is in crunch mode to meet a deadline. So my original question was more like is this team even set up correctly?

I'm not trying to argue that no one is irreplaceable, I think I'm just trying to say that by being irreplaceable for a specific thing, it just means that once you are gone a new thing will have to happen, which isn't necessarily good or bad. Change is constant and whether someone quits, or an asteroid takes out your dev office, companies will find a way to make do in far more cases than traditionally is thought feasible.

Initiated a pull request last night for one of mozilla's project. Hope they accept and merge!

Open source is fun, especially Mozilla, they got people who you can reach out via irc, bug tracker so it's a pleasant learning experience.

How'd you get started? There's projects I would like to work on for the purposes of helping gain employment at certain companies but I look at the code and just have no idea what I could even do.

I feel the same way and have bad luck so far with trying to contribute. Most active projects I've come across have giant code bases and seem to get most contributions from people working for businesses that rely on whatever technology it is. I have actually submitted 2 pull requests on small projects I found that I felt I could help out with some bug fixes (1 small javascript game engine and a random jquery plugin that was breaking on touch devices). Both projects had activity in the month or so prior to when I issued the pull request and then were subsequently abandoned after my pull request lol.

A long while back I also found a drupal module I thought I could help out on. I worked a bit on a feature request and shared my code with the maintainer. She gave me rights to edit the git repo but went out of her way to prevent me from being added to the maintainers list... it rubbed me the wrong way and haven't touched drupal since.

I've been checking out a site called http://assembly.com/ where you supposedly can get paid contributing but haven't spent much time looking at any of the projects in depth.

Ideally I'd like to work at twitter, and they have a ton of Scala open source projects like finatra, but I imagine it's exactly like you said where it's probably only people using it in their work that contribute

There are definitely a lot of people that dive into new projects for fun and contribute. It's just that those people also are at the level where they can pull that off. Also, I'm sure most of these types are just working on gaining recognition so they can charge more / move into consulting etc

The meme of watch a code school series and go contribute on github isn't reality imo.

I've contributed to a bunch of open source projects and the majority of them are super slow to actually pull in patches. It's annoying - but most of the time these are people that are either volunteering or have work from their employee that takes priority so slow is just kind of the name of the game.

Well, school is over and the real learning starts Monday, I am very excited to begin my career.

It also somehow seems fitting that the hardest test I ever took was my last final today in Theory of Algorithms

I am not sure what your experience level is, but for me I'm still considered a beginner so I had to find projects that weren't too big. They had to be small, but not so small where no one is ever creating issues or merging pull requests. It's good to find a project where there is someone actively creating a to-do list. Some of them look really easy 2-3 one liner changes. Another requirement was that it had to be a GUI application that people use. It's more fun to contribute to a project that you yourself could see the changes.

I do agree that it is overwhelming to look at code from a project for the first time. Your first step is to git clone the project and just build it by following their guidelines. Don't just go browsing through the code on Github that will not do you any good.

After that is done, run the program and get a good idea of what how the program works right now from the end user perspective. From there, you can browse through the bug list (Again it is important you find a project that a list of issues). Make sure you can reproduce the problem and then from there on you find that specific area in the code where it is executed. Make some changes, see it not fix the problem, read documentation, try again, doesn't work, rinse repeat.

And finally, don't set your expectations to high. Sign up for the mailing list and idle in IRC. Half the stuff that guys discuss about, might not make sense, but will eventually or at least I hope.

My pull requests might not get merged, however the effort I put into understanding and reading other people's code has been more than beneficial. It's all about that struggle, nothing is easy.

This assembly website looks interesting. From what I understand they back the operation costs until the product ships. Users get rewarded in "app coins" which is translated to percentages of revenue. Once the product ships and enough revenue comes in, they take 10% afterwards and the rest goes out to the users based on the # of app coins.

Generally speaking, when job-searching online for programming related jobs how strict are the companies on their list of requirements? The list of requirements seems to be a mile long for every single job that is posted.

Generally speaking, not at all strict. They tend to be more like wishlists.

You should start going to metups for your technologies of choice, I know we're going to be looking to have a presence at those as part of our hiring strategy.

At the very least meetups will give you some pretty awesome people watching and an ego boost when you realize that in order to get a job, all you'll need to be is less aspy than the average person there.

Hey guys I have to watch like 100 hours of corporate videos before the end of the year. I just thought I'd share some of the amazing insights I've learned so far, free of charge!

1. Innovation is good
2. Integrity is more important now than ever in today's 24/7 digital world
3. Even though we're totally awesome now, we should change. Because look at the rotary phone. It was awesome once. Now not so much.
4. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Look at Rosa Parks.

That is all for now. ~70 more hours to go.

The awesome thing is we have to answer quizzes about every video and get a perfect score. Now wait, is it "innovation + collaboration = perseverance" or "cooperation + perseverance = innovation"? Crap.

When RightNow got acquired by Oracle a few years back I got to watch a bunch of mandatory training. I don't think it came anywhere close to 100 hours though.

My favorite was the one about ethical business behavior which had a repetitious tagline: "NO BRIBES!"

It was a common refrain about the office for a few weeks after that.

I don't think it's really 100 hours. And I don't have to watch it, but I've been strongly encouraged to. When I look at the list of people who have already done it in my department, anyone who has any career ambitions within the company is on it.

The security stuff was actually pretty interesting. But most of the other stuff has been corporate mumbo jumbo.

"We must develop a mindset that is business-focused, highly collaborative and deeply embraces critical thinking". You can't write this ****.

I vow that if I ever somehow get into a position where they ask me to create this stuff, I will not use one word of hollow corporate gobbledy-g0ok. Which probably assures I will never have to face that dilemma.

6 videos on Big Data. Kill me now.

Find better meetups, IMO. The majority of people I meet are wicked smart, doing stuff I never even considered, much less thought possible.

Unfortunately, I have no choice of meetups (good or bad). I think people where I live still use the abacus. A search of "javascript" for my city on indeed.com illicits 12 job postings. Compare that to a tech hub like San Francisco which has almost 4k postings.

wow, you got hits. The results for my area either weren't javascript or weren't for my area (i.e. required 1k+ mile relocations)

I drive an hour+ each way, a few times month, for a variety of meetups(clojure, js, data analytics...).

I've pretty much given up on meetups for the same reason. It's usually a 1-2.5 hour drive each way (depending on traffic) and its almost always not worth the effort.