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Description
Individuals in an organization may (rightfully so) be motivated by personal objectives like furthering their own career. Therefore they may ask:
How does it help me, when I contribute to an InnerSource project?
What do I gain? What do I learn?
How does it make a difference for me personally?
Below we capture notes from a group discussion at InnerSource Gathering Berlin 2025 about this topic.
Advantages on an individual level
- more visibility of the individual in the organization (by contributing outside of your team to another project, more people can see your work(
- increased network (through contributions you get to know more people in the org)
- fullfill requirements for a senior role
- receive appreciation (possibly with some company tools for "kudos" or similar)
- learn how to build pragmatic solutions (i.e. rolling your own solution for every problem is "easy". However making trade-offs and finding something that is good enough while reducing the overall maintenance cost for the company is a lot harder)
- improve social skills / communication and conflict resolution among others (see a related talk)
- work together with more skilled peopled (the idea being that no matter how good the people in your team are, in a large enough org the majority of amazing people will always work in other teams)
- gain agency (you are the master of your own destiny by deciding which projects to contribute to)
Changes in HR processes
- allow for engineers to evolve without becoming managers (individual contributor track)
- TODO: how to hire for that mindset? (growth mindset)
- TODO: cheat sheet how to make typical requirements that already exist in career ladders today
Other notes
- we did not explore how to convince middle managers of the benefits of InnerSource / see pattern draft related to the Middle Management Mindset
References to consider
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