How to find awesome companies to work with? The short answer is: don’t find them, let them find you! We live in a connected world. We have global competition. It is not necessary, but, it is an interesting option to have skills that are valued at global level.
One way to pick up skills is to go to university. You do work on awesome projects, you have great peers and connections, but, often time people accept you only on the basis of the university’s reputation. You are also evaluated and socially graded according to it. There is a hiring bias of whether or not you walked on the sacred grounds of Stanford. There is also the business of recognition. Not all universities are recognized everywhere.
The experience of workplaces differ. Levels are not the same everywhere. They do not mean the same thing. A senior someone at company x might be a junior someone at company y. Time in a field is also bad metric of evaluation. 10 years or 3 years don’t matter as much as the skills do. What projects you worked on can be gauged via interviews.
One way to evaluate yourself according to global standards and set yourself at such level is through OpenSource. Due to greed, companies value OpenSource a lot as it let them have some free, stellar-quality assets to start with. If you started furniture production, you have some initial costs associated which is related to the base material itself. This is not so if you use OpenSource.
The software world nowadays turn around OpenSource. The biggest hit products of our time are open. Almost all servers on the internet use OS. Almost all websites use open techs. Even if an ecosystem is a walled garden, they taste the sweet fruits of open components. Currently, you cannot beat the quality of software that a bunch of mostly unpaid people work on in their spare time.
The thing is, if you become an integral part of this ecosystem, if you become a core piece of it, you become a valuable resource for companies operating within that sphere. And with remote, this opportunity is available wherever you are. To start and contribute meaningfully, you need to help yourself get started. It’s a continuous journey; albeit, a delightful one.