The Builder.com.au site has a new article posted today about Open Source developers and why your company could benefit from adding them to your workforce.

Some companies are afraid that hiring an open source developer would be a liability - possibly reverse engineering their proprietary software and then releasing forked versions into the community. Although these may sound like justifiable fears, they overlook some very important benefits that come with hiring open source developers. Let's take a look at some good reasons to hire open source developers.

They list the five reasons (from a business perspective) companies shouldn't be afraid of adding Open Source developers to their teams:

• You can see more than their resumes.
• Open source developers have had to think on their toes and patch the programs that Microsoft has (often times) intentionally broken.
• Open source developers are [generally] very passionate about what they do.
• Along with an open source developer you will enjoy open source support.
• And like adopting any open source project, you will save money.

If you're a developer out there and are looking for that next job (contract or otherwise), you might check out this advice from Cal Evans as to what he, a hiring manager in the past, has looked for in a developer's resume.

am often asked to take a look at friends resume to give pointers on how that can make it more effective. Invariably, my advice is the same, so I'll share it here. When I was a manager and in charge of hiring, your resume had to get my attention for me to even consider it. If you got my attention, you had a much better chance at getting the job. That's the secret: get my attention, and get the job.

He points out that the usual situation is one manager to a large group of applicants. You may see the job post once, but so do 30 other people and you're all trying to grab attention. What's his recommendation? Brevity. Keep the first page short then dive deep behind that. There's more great tips in the rest of the post.

Richard Thomas has ventured out into a new consulting venture that he's announced today:

As I mentioned in the prior post I am pretty much a "Jack of all Trades" when it comes to website development. [...] So with that I have revived my consulting company under the name PHPJack, my website is http://www.phpjack.com.

Plus, not only has the company been launched but he's already looking for other developers to hire on and help him with "a couple projects" that are already in the works. Send him a resume at richard [at] phpjack.com if you're interested (Seattle area only).

Andi Gutmans has good news for anyone out thre that has wanted to get involved with the Zend Framework on a more official level - they're looking to grow the core team:

Zend Framework has become an immensely successful project. [...] There's a large community of contributors, over 15 translations of the documentation and runs some cool apps like IBM's QedWiki. We are currently looking to grow the team with very experienced Senior Web developers, both from within and outside the PHP community.

Those interested should look forward to working in a "broad, vibrant and passionate community". Check out the full job description for more information.

In his latest post, Andrei Zmievski notes something that might have slipped through the cracks, but is still worth nothing. Sara Golemon, author of the recently released "Extending and Embedding PHP" book from Sam's Publishing, is joining up with the group at Yahoo!

She notes in her blog entry:

After well over half a decade at the University of California at Berkeley, I'm moving on to greener pastures. Well, maybe not greener (Berkeley is full of evergreens and...other verdant plant substances), but pastures at the very least. Next monday, my life's journy will bring me to that farmland come technopolis known the world over as Silicon Valley. I'll be cubefarming private sector style for one of the few dotcom survivors, a little mom & pop outfit called Yahoo!.

Many congrats to Sara, author of runkit, classkit, ssh2, and other PECL packages as well as a regular contributor to PHP core - enjoy life at the new job and have fun working in the Search & Marketplace Group!