Gen Z in Open Source

I recently had the opportunity to read an article by Abigail Cabunoc Mayes titled: Who will maintain the future? Rethinking open source leadership for a new generation

After reading it, it sparked some reflections: I am doing open source for a living (I am an OSS Engineer at LlamaIndex), and I am also Gen Z, so I thought that maybe sharing my view on the topic could be interesting.

I’ll try to give my perspective on the some of the steps the article individuates as key in involving Gen Z devs into Open Source projects.

Introduction

Since Abigail’s article begins with an anecdote, I will do the same here.

During my first year of University I had the opportunity of joining a students residence with a vibrant cultural environment: even if I had been part of the community for just a couple of months, I really wanted to contribute with initiatives of my own. Despite my enthusiasm, my lack of seniority was perceived as lack of competence, so, even if I actually had things to share that could’ve made the community grow and thrive even more, I was basically cut off from contributing.

Although what happens in the OSS world might not be as sharp and as evident everywhere, this dynamic of seniority = skills is pervasive. And it definitely is a killer for Gen-Z people trying to breaking into open source contributions.

So let’s imagine David, a senior software engineer that has been the core maintainer of a big open source project for 15 years. What can David do to attract and retain Gen Z contributors, thus ensuring the future leadership for his project?

First Contact

In order to attract a Gen Z dev it is for sure important to have visual content, a strong internet presence and maybe even social accounts on YouTube or TikTok, but it is also important to create clear guidelines for contributing.

Most of Gen-Z programmers right now are just entering the market or at a junior stage, so David can’t obviously expect them to look at his large codebase, maybe nested and with lots of non-explicit structure and conventions, and understand it immediately, knowing how to contribute. On the contrary, many younger devs might be scared (I was, and I still am when I have to do my first contribution to a new project I did not design): this fear is not only the fear of doing the wrong thing, but the fear of dismissal, of being judged and maybe even ridiculed for what we wrote, or for being labeled as AI slop. These are fears most older programmers don’t have, because they learnt (through experience, in a time where social media weren’t as pervasive as today) that most of the times getting things wrong leads to a couple of comments on the PR by the maintainer and some suggestions on how to improve.

So some things David can include in his contribution guide are:

• Code structure (where to look for what, basically)
• Contribution flow (set up, best practices, explanation of continuous integration/deployment pipelines)
• Conventions (file/variable naming, unit vs end-to-end testing, test coverage…)
• Community standards: putting forward that the community of maintainers values kindness, inclusion and mutual respect not only makes David’s project a better place overall, but also encourages people to try, knowing that, even if they fail, the maintainers in the community won’t rage-tweet on X or Mastodon that their code is garbage.

Participation and Retention

David successfully managed to attract some Gen-Z first time contributors, but how can he make sure they do not lose interest quick?

Unlike twenty years ago, the pervasive presence of social media made its way also in recruitment: it’s not unusual that job applications ask for your LinkedIn, X or GitHub profile. This is actually an opportunity for the OSS world: you can ensure that Gen-Z devs (the most likely demographic to use social media) stay in your project by setting up a badge campaign for your Discord community (you get the contributor or star role if you are consistently contributing to the project), offer shout-out or share stories of long-term contributors on LinkedIn or YouTube, invite them on podcasts on Spotify… The social media world is vast and offers many possibilities for rewarding your contributors and helping them with concrete proof that they are part of something or that they designed some cool features - and ultimately they will have many things for recruiters to see!

Social media are one of many ways, and they’re not for sure the solution, but they can be a good starting point.

Leadership

Based on what I can see from myself, and hear from many other Gen Z developers, leadership is something that we hardly take upon us willingly.

OSS is a place where many people are like David: seasoned experts of their field, that know their codebases by heart and could write code even with their eyes closed.

For many young people, in this sense, getting to a leadership position among coding giants like David is synonym for imposter syndrome: being young and being already leading a project, in a field with such fierce competition and such concentration of brilliant minds, makes you question yourself and your skills every day, and the pressure sometimes becomes unbearable. That’s why many Gen-Z devs opt out of leadership roles.

There are, tho, ways to make us approach leadership roles in a softer way: more senior maintainers like David could start gradually granting us more trust, giving us more responsibility and more freedom of action, as well as more independence in our decisions. By working our way to the top one small step at a time, we will really feel like we earned our leadership, and will feel less out of place.

Also, leadership is better when shared: Gen-Z often values diversity, inclusion and equal opportunities, so the more diverse and inclusive you leadership base can be, the more it will be captivating for the new generation.

Conclusion

What I wrote in this blog post is mostly related to my experience and what I can see on social media: it might be wrong, but it’s a part of the wide and diverse picture that makes up Gen-Z.

If you would like to share your opinion about this, whether you are a seasoned maintainer or a young developer looking to break into Open Source, feel free to do so on any of my social platforms.