

Ask HN: How to be altruistic while working full-time? - m4rcadam

I&#x27;m a full-time software developer at a company based in Boston, and most of the work that I do is backend (python&#x2F;mongo&#x2F;data) and is really tailored to the applications we&#x27;re currently developing<p>I&#x27;d really like to contribute to open source projects but I feel like i never have the time to, or that If I were to contribute I would be spending less time doing work and more time focusing on the projects I&#x27;m contributing to. You would say that I should write better code and release code as packages or blueprints, but most of the code is proprietary, we&#x27;re still validating our products, and if I were to do that I would have to spend a lot more time to add more functionality that really isn&#x27;t used in my application, and iterations would generally take longer.<p>My question is this: how do you give yourself time to work on open source projects? do you feel like contributing to open source is better (in some sense) than contributing to the growth of your own company? or how do you make contributions&#x2F;build open source projects as part of your job?
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taprun
It sounds like you are trying to optimize for two goals:

1) Contribute to open source 2) Limit the amount of time you spend on tasks
that don't contribute to your company

The solution seems simple enough. Examine the open source tools that you use
to build your company. When you find problems, issues or inefficiencies in
those tools, fix them. This will hopefully improve the tools and speed up your
work on your company at the same time.

Alternatively, give the tools free press in your
Twitter/Facebook/blog/whatever communications and hopefully you'll encourage
someone else to contribute instead. As an added bonus, such communications may
help spread word of your company.

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thejteam
Unless you own the company, the work you do outside of work should contribute
to YOUR growth, not the company's. Are you going to be learning something new
and interesting? Building a portfolio to get your next job? Not sure what the
answer should be in your situation, just something to think about.

