Subcultures
An estimated 4,000 open source professionals exist in Australia (a total of 10,000 are employed in the industry). Highly paid and in demand, they form one of the most important subcultures in the technology sector.
If a top-notch Ruby on Rails coder is looking for a new job, which recruitment firm would she turn to? Can you name a company who stands out as an ‘employer of choice’ for open source professionals? Does a specific job board or a community for php developers exist? I know of none. From a recruitment perspective no one in particular owns (serve) the open source space.
One way of looking at the talent landscape is to map the entire workforce into different sub-cultures. The 250 plus job boards in Australia are arranged to serve various groups. Likewise, recruitment firms are often categorised according to the markets and niches they serve. But, look deeper and you will discover many more groups exist and new ones are created daily. The technology sector alone can be sliced and diced into hundreds of subcultures according to age, ethnicity, location, gender, linguistic, education, gender, education or a combination of factors.
The Internet has accelerated two things – the ability for people with similar qualities or common interests to come together and form a distinct group. Secondly, the tools to find, connect and interact with even the most obscure groups are readily available.
Here’s the opportunity – many subcultures remained either unknown or underserved. Planning sourcing strategy according to how people identify and organise themselves is rich in potential. It really is about seeing sourcing from the candidate’s point of view.
If the plan is to serve a sub-culture, it seems to me that the open source community is ripe to be courted.
Hi Phil
Theres numerous communities for this thing on LinkedIn. http://www.opensourceuniverse.com is one group on LinkedIn and there’s numerous others. Companies like Unisys, Logica, Cap-Gemini, Accenture etc etc are probably employers of choice in this space as would numerous other IT Consulting organisations and Application development firms. For Recruitment and Job boards, the specific market is probably too narrow though there probably is room for one spanning Software and Apps Development as a whole and NOTHING else. Most IT recruitment firms would have a consultant or consultants who cover this area as they would do for all other disciplines for software / application development, .NET, Java etc though there maybe a small boutique who specialises purely in this space? Cheers
Hi Graham, good information.
I was using open source as an example to explain sub cultures. My argument is that the Internet allows even micro-groups (say 100 people) to be be easily found and served.
Still, do anyone in our industry OWN the open source space?