I was very involved in GSoC from an open source perspective for many years. I think this is the best tweak they've made in years. There is so much talent outside of the University system, and widening this will give lots of motivated people opportunities they otherwise wouldn't have.
Glad to see Google keeping this alive! I benefited a lot from participating in the GSoC program twice and I probably wouldn't be where I am right now without it! It can't be overstated how valuable the mentorship and open-source community experience is for programmers in the beginning of their careers.
Great, sure. But the motivation is not purely altruistic, is it? I imagine this is a great recruiting vehicle. (Which is... good for them, not dinging them for it.)
I don't think it is for recruiting which is such a missed opportunity for them. I participated in two GSoC and interviewed with Google later. Somehow, they were the one which gave zero fuck to GSoC or anything else in the CV and just focused on their coding round for evaluation.
It may not be purely altruistic, but seems like a net good. Participants aren’t under any obligation to work for Google, and for some participants working for Google might be a desirable opportunity! If not, this is a chance to get experience working on impactful open source projects and get paid for it.
Personally I think it’s great when incentives align this way.
It's rarely altruistic but this seems very win/win to me. Talent without a record can prove their chops and get hired above their on-paper experience level, Google gets an additional avenue of recruitment.
A few years ago GSoC students could get directly get an interview at Google, but the rule has been changed since then and I don't think they use GSoC for recruiting anymore.
> Rather than a mandatory 12-week program that runs from June – August with everyone required to finish their projects by the end of the 12th week, we are opening it up so mentors and their GSoC Contributors can decide together if they want to extend the deadline for the project up to 22 weeks.
Year after year thousands of bright young minds just come to the valley to build and innovate. Just look at Musk, it was either PayPal or military service during Apartheid...
Not a good example. You make it sound like he was being persecuted back in South Africa, which is not true.
Musk was from a wealthy family. And he actually went to Canada first.
(Don't get me wrong — I think it's a good thing for the world that Musk ended up in America).
A better example to make your point would have been Andrew Grove. He had a horrible early life in eastern Europe during the Nazi WW2 era before he made his way to America.
And he was one of first employees at Intel, and eventually became CEO. See how that literally ties in with going to "Silicon" valley? :)
I looked into it, and the US counts 3 years of qualified work experience as 1 year of academic studies, and requires the equivalent of 4 years of college studying for H1B visas. Someone with no degree needs 12 years of qualified work experience, someone with a 2 year degree needs 8 years of work experience, etc.
According to this Quora answer[1] regarding H1B:
> Out of 108,101 initial employment approvals in 2017, less than 200 were for individuals with less than a bachelors degree (this includes associate degrees).
Well, in USA, for foreign students there's the OPT and CPT programs that allows them to get jobs and internships in the area of their study, and even work in the US for a limited number of years (2 or 3 depending on what they studied) after their graduation.
Also, they have very precise definitions of what work is considered to be in a given field of study. So for instance, a foreign student can't be a CS major and then go work as a chef in a restaurant. However, they can work at tech companies as a software engineer.
What resources? It was a straightforward process for me.
Here's my experience applying for student visa from India.
Once the US university accepted me, they physically mailed me the paperwork (acceptance letter, I20/DS2019 form etc).
I scheduled an appointment (which involved filling up a huge form online that took 2 hours) with my nearest US Consulate, which was the one in Chennai. I believe (not sure) the US Consulate in Chennai is the largest consulate US has worldwide. I think this facility processes the most number of visas or something.
At my meeting with the US consular officer they examined the paperwork, and my visa was approved.
The meeting with consular officer took only 5 minutes, though I had to wait an hour to reach the front of the line. They didn't even ask me too much questions — just what my parents and siblings did.
However, I hear about a lot of people who got their student visa application rejected, so I have no idea why it was easy for me and hard for them.
And I did this twice. Once for a single semester exchange program to the US, and another when I decided to get my master's degree from USA. The visa interview was a pleasant experience both times.
Later, when my parents decided to visit the US, it was a straightforward process for them as well to get a tourist visa.
Of course, work visa is a totally different beast, I hear.
(Also — not relevant, but I returned back to India after my masters due to personal reasons. I had a really good time in America).
I've heard you need to show availability of funds to pay for the whole period of school when you apply for the visa[1]? Anyway, you need to pay for the school at some point and some schools charge international students extra, or anyway full rate. So, if the problem was not enough money to go to school at home, coming to the US for school doesn't seem to help?
[1] I've also heard there are services which will park their money in your account for a couple days so it looks like you've got it all.
It is already pretty hard on maintainers which I don’t believe get paid. I think it’s worth it if it’s for students but it should have been a separate program if it’s just some random person wanting to get involved.
I do not know if random student to be able earn money for open source work is somehow inherently better than random person getting it.
I could be more concerned if they made program more restrictive. But making it more open is not only more practical and useful for people at large it is also ethically better thing to do.
Besides if someone dislike Google's decision they are welcome to not participate.
Depends on how they are going to be selecting participants (blogpost doesn’t mention that). If that opens up a floodgate for yesterday’s freelancers to suddenly be interested in open source (but really just to make a quick buck) then i can see projects pulling out bc it repurposes the program from purely mentorship/education-focused to commercial and the end result will be worse for everyone.
Suppose Google dropped all pretense and offered full-time work to any qualified applicant willing to work for minimum living wage—a 21st century workfare program. What would those numbers look like? What are the costs of the overheads? Suppose Google is able to draw managers ("mentors") from the upper end of the same applicant pool. What's the upper bound on programmers after arriving at an equilibrium by iteration? Knuth estimates 2% of the world has what it takes to be a programmer. Is that a reasonable upper bound for such a program, considering that the existence of the program will by incentive probably double or quadruple the number of working programmers in the world, but also keeping in mind that the most of the world's existing and aspiring programmers won't be interested in minimum wage long-term?
Knuth's 2% estimate is the number of people who "really “resonates” with programming the way I do" [1], it is not an estimate for the number of people who have "what it takes" to program for a living.
> Knuth estimates 2% of the world has what it takes to be a programmer.
Without knowing Knuth's criteria it sounds arbitrary. Would it be Knuth caliber programer? Then 2 percent seems high. Or one could change webpage color / deploy some simple app with click of button or running couple line of script. I guess 80% of adult population might be able to do in 2030.
> but also keeping in mind that the most of the world's existing and aspiring programmers won't be interested in minimum wage long-term
Well minimum wage workers are also not interested in that for long term. However that's what people will do if it is the only thing available.
Without knowing Knuth's criteria it sounds arbitrary. Would it be Knuth caliber programer? Then 2 percent seems high. Or one could change webpage color / deploy some simple app with click of button or running couple line of script. I guess 80% of adult population might be able to do in 2030.
My guess it required quite a bit of technical finesses not obvious to a person with some technical experience.
When Knuth made that prediction, there were probably tons of rough edges to programming. But now we have powerful abstractions that make it much simpler. I think his estimate makes more sense if you qualify it as someone who is able to investigate and devise a bugfix for anywhere in that great sea of abstractions.
I was interested in where the 2% number came from and found the full context:
> Educators of computer science have repeatedly observed that only about 2 out of every 100 students enrolling in introductory programming classes really resonate with the subject and seem to be natural-born computer scientists...I conclude that roughly 2% of all people ‘think algorithmically,’ in the sense that they can reason rapidly about algorithmic processes
I'm not really sure what you mean. Google already offers full-time software development work to any qualified applicant for more than a minimum living wage. If they wanted to employ significantly more developers I'm not sure how lowering the compensation offer would help them.
a cynical person might suspect it's a cheap way to increase the supply of labor (and thereby decrease its cost) while generating good PR at the same time.
It's up to individual organizations to specify their criteria for GSoC Contributors.
Personal opinion (off the record - haven't discussed with other admins in the org): It's absolutely appropriate and I'd encourage you to apply somewhere, as long as you're happy with the conditions and the stipend that Google offers.
Would someone with a full time tech job be able to manage a program like this? Fyi I made a career change into coding 3yrs ago. I’ve been in two roles that have given coding experiences but it’s not the majority of the time. I work with open source projects, i.e. Kubernetes and would love to eventually be a open source contributor in the future.
11 hours per week over 12 weeks would be a stretch if you're working full-time. Depends on the organization, but I'd personally be hesitant due to this.
Do get in touch with an organization and see how they feel about it.
As someone fortunate enough to participate in the GSoC twice, I think this is fantastic news. I had such a great experience and learned a lot. It’s wonderful that this change allows even more people the opportunity to be compensated for open source dev.
They can both be valuable from a student perspective; GSoC from my experience is a full time gig during that time.
I don't how many internships Google has but SoC is 1-2k people a year
Google Internships from Google's perspective is people that they may want to hire. Summer of Code the candidates are chosen by the participating organizations so it's a wider range.
Some things I observed from a quick glance through it:
- On most years there's about 1200-ish students from about 60-ish countries.
- There's a disproportionate number of students from India, like far above other countries, even United States.
I did my undergrad from India, and masters program from USA. (I'm now back in India working as a software developer).
At my university in India, we had this sort of club for enthusiast programmers who would contribute to open source software after regular class hours. Each student would pick a major project and contribute to it.
It was fun and we learnt a lot that way. Every year some members of this club would apply for gsoc (with the projects that they had already been contributing to during the months leading upto it), and about a dozen students used to get selected into the program.
Participation in open source was something that was actively promoted there. I couldn't find anything similar during my time in USA, although I only have the data-point of a single US university.
Semesters were longer than summer break, so the intent was longer internships. Also, we were encouraged to take an internship that spanned over a summer + semester so there was enough time to get up to speed and do meaningful work.
Plus, like you said, competition. There is a lot more available time for internships if you accept doing them outside of just June - August.
I did GSoC a couple of years ago and it opened so many doors for me, I immigrated with the stipend and found my first job because of it. I'm so happy it's going to be opened to people with other backgrounds.
for anyone curious, for most countries adjustment goes down and that means $1500 for 3 months of work => $500/month, on top of that you will also have to pay tax.
It was higher when I participated but still adjusted by country purchasing power. The duration was longer than last year and we had three evaluations instead of two.
I don't speak for Google, however I was involved in Summer of Code from the open source side when this decision was made. The reason given was that they were concerned that the amounts were having a disproportionate impact on some students, paying significantly more than the jobs it was meant to compete with to the extent that getting into Sumner of Code was one of the main objectives for students rather than a nice to have.
I can tell you that when it was announced it was a very unpopular move with the mentoring organisations, where the strong feeling was that equal work deserves equal pay, but ultimately the decision for mentoring orgs is to participate or not, and the vast majority chose to participate.
Google should be paying a competitive wage to support these projects. They can afford to! They don't get to get cheap publicity and goodwill by putting their name on this thing while paying developers who work on these projects like crap.
Great. Now stop the preferential treatment of Ivy League grads in recruiting and among FTEs as well. From what I have seen, they aren't any more capable than the rest.
