Twitter hosts hacker open-house, not-so-secret recruitment event

Twitter is opening its doors to open-source hackers for a few hours next Thursday night.

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The OSS-themed open house will bring some of the brightest software engineers and developers to Twitter’s fancy new Art Deco headquarters for the “Twitter Runtime Systems Summit: Open Source Edition.”

Topics discussed will include Zipkin, the company’s open-source, homebrewed distributed tracing system; Twemcache, Twitter’s tweaked memcached fork; and how the microblogging service is using Apache Mesos, a platform for resource isolation and sharing for distributed applications and frameworks.

Speakers will include Twitter runtime engineer Vinod Kone, onetime Hadoop/Cassandra contributor Johan Oskarsson, Apache Hive contributor Franklin Hu, Twitter cache team lead Manju Rajashekhar, cache team member Yao Yue, and Berkeley compsci PhD candidate Benjamin Hindman.

Of course, this is one very clever way of widening Twitter’s pool of software developer job applicants. These poor, helpless neckbeards* are being lured into Twitter’s gingerbread house with promises of open-source software, only to be polled on the Eventbrite page about their interest in a job at Twitter.

FOSS itself is, for many of the cleverer and hotter startups in the area, one big HR recruitment ploy. Devs love working with it, working on it, and contributing to it. And when we call it a “ploy,” we only mean it’s a ploy in the most jovial sense. In an open-source, open-house recruitment gambit, everyone wins, including devs, recruiters, and even the end users whose online lives depend on open-source software. And in an extremely, ridiculously competitive hiring environment, it’s actually a pretty good way to cast a dragnet for the kinds of devs you’re seeking.

The event will take place Thursday, July 26 and will begin at 6:30 p.m. You’ll need to book a free ticket on Eventbrite (linked above), but they’re going fast.

*Note: The term “neckbeard” is not used with any kind of derision. The author of this post would be a full-on neckbeard if she possessed the necessary Y-chromosomes to do so.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

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