Nearly four-fifths of developers (79%) believe that contributing to open source projects has helped further their careers, but 78% still say that companies should pay them for the time spent on contributions.
This is according to a new survey from the CNCF and TAG Contributor Strategy (TAG CS), which is a group within the CNCF that helps the organization’s projects build and maintain sustainable contributor strategies.
The top career benefits from working on open-source projects included learning from collaboration with others and advancing technical skills.
In addition, sixty-five percent of respondents say they work on bug fixes, 62% write documentation, and 55% work on writing new features, which are all transferable skills in software development.
Fifty-nine percent of respondents to the survey contribute to projects on work time and 25% contribute full time.
The survey also found that over half (53%) were “regular, frequent, or high-volume” contributors and a third were maintainers.
The majority of respondents (59%) said they plan to increase their contributions to CNCF projects in the next year. Twenty-eight percent of respondents will keep their contributions at the same amount and less than five percent said they’ll contribute less.
