In my current job, I was hired based on my previous professional work as a DevOps engineer for a three month emergency job, in order to set up a basic CICD pipeline for a project. Two months in, once the basics were in place I pivoted to embedded software development in that same project and I'm still there nine months later.
I didn't have any professional experience in that particular area, but that pivot was possible thanks to my previous open-source work and general faffing about with low-level stuff. That part gave me an edge during the interview over the other candidates, to the point that they straight up selected me without even seeing the rest.
Open-source work is like professional work for a job: the experience is relevant if it's applicable for the job at hand. Writing boatloads of NPM modules will not help much if the job is about working with resource-constrained microcontrollers and real-time operating systems.
I didn't have any professional experience in that particular area, but that pivot was possible thanks to my previous open-source work and general faffing about with low-level stuff. That part gave me an edge during the interview over the other candidates, to the point that they straight up selected me without even seeing the rest.
Open-source work is like professional work for a job: the experience is relevant if it's applicable for the job at hand. Writing boatloads of NPM modules will not help much if the job is about working with resource-constrained microcontrollers and real-time operating systems.