Skip to main content

Managing Open Source Talent

Managing talent in financial institutions is crucial because the quality, motivation, and expertise of their workforce directly influence the institutions' ability to innovate, maintain a competitive edge, comply with regulatory requirements, and ultimately drive financial performance and growth.

THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER

Attracting Talent​

  • Sponsoring Events
  • Visibility in the open source space by contributing projects or engineering muscle

Nurturing Talent​

  • Train new and coach existing open source leaders
  • Recognize contributions of organization's members
  • Create programs to incentivize contributions of organization's members
  • Drive an internal open source ambassadors program
  • Making it easy to contribute
  • Set up open source career paths

Retaining Talent​

  • Finance organisations are great at attracting talent by simply paying very high wages. The problem is attrition.
  • It's important to understand that lots of open source is developed for non-financial rewards.
  • If you hire a key engineer who is a top contributor to an open source project and then prevent them from contributing further then they will likely leave.
  • Even if you allow them to continue contributing, if the workflow is onerous (e.g. MD-level reviews of their code) they will also get fed up and leave.
  • To retain these high-performing staff, you have to give them the right tools to carry on contributing effectively.
  • Also: GitHub is becoming a CV.
  • Ironically, hiring from a strategic open source project actually will reduce the value of that project if the employee isn't allowed to contribute back.

Proprietary Platforms​

Developers don't want to work on your organisation's proprietary platform as their skills are not transferable and they are less productive (the ecosystem is smaller than with open source tools). Using open source is a big attraction:

"[Our organisation] had problems with retention and recruitment. That all changed when we adopted Kubernetes, Node, Linux. " - Microsoft OSPO staff

  • Finance organisations are great at attracting talent by simply paying very high wages. The problem is attrition.
  • It's important to understand that lots of open source is developed for non-financial rewards.
  • If you hire a key engineer who is a top contributor to an open source project then you are preventing them from contributing anymore. They will leave.
  • Even if you allow them to continue contributing, but the workflow is onerous (e.g. MD-level reviews of their code) they will also get fed up and leave.
  • To retain these high-performing staff, you have to give them the right tools to carry on contributing effectively.
  • GitHub is becoming a CV.

Maturity Checklist​