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Chrome OS, Android, and Other Trends Boost Open Source Jobs

Last week, in a post called "Open Source Skills As a Job Seeker's Key Differentiator," I provided a chart showing rapid growth in jobs available for people with open source skills for platforms such as Drupal and Joomla. The trend is up while the economy is down. We've done several other posts on how open source skills can arm a college graduate looking for tech work, or a recently laid off worker, with powerful calling cards for finding employment. That's why Glyn Moody's post today, "Will Chrome OS Burnish the Open Source Jobs Market?" caught my eye. He makes a number of good points, and the trend he points to is likely to spread out with several beneficial results.

Moody writes:

"Overall, though, we now have Google pushing not one, but *two* operating system based on Linux – Android being the other. Add in all the other companies that will be jumping on this new bandwagon, and you have an unprecedented momentum behind free software in this sector. 2010, the Year of the GNU/Linux desktop, anyone? Demand for IT professionals with strong Linux skills will surge as a result of Google’s upcoming release of the Chrome operating system, according to recruitment agency CV Screen."

The last sentence, there, of course, assumes that Chrome OS will be a big player in enterprises, which I'm not completely sure of due to the entrenchment of Windows there. Nevertheless, Chrome OS is going into netbooks, and Google has announced that Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Asus and others are hardware partners.

There are going to be systems based on this Linux-based operating system for which contributions need to come from developers, designers, and more. Likewise, Google itself is going to have to put people behind Chrome OS, and, with three updates to Android expected this year, Google has to keep putting people behind Android as well.

It's easy to miss the fact that many companies that you wouldn't think of as entirely open source employ many people for their open source skills. Yahoo!, for example, has a number of employees who work on Hadoop clustered search projects exclusively. Glyn Moody's post includes this quote:

"In what has been a tough marketplace, we have seen demand for open source technologies such as PHP, Linux and MySQL hold up fairly well and it is one area where we have been regularly placing candidates,' said Matthew Iveson, director of specialist IT recruitment at CV Screen."

Open source development has moved way beyond the production of components that developers share, to meaningful platforms that companies of all stripes deploy and support. It's never been more true that open source skills are great as differentiators in a harrowing job market.
 

• Android
• google
• Hadoop
• jobs
• employment
• Chrome OS

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