
Pronking for Programmers - paulbutcher
http://paulbutcher.com/2014/04/20/pronking-for-programmers/
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luu
When I look at the best programmers I know, none have them have done any open
source work whatsoever. This group of people ranges from IBM fellows who
created some of the earliest minicomputers to IMO medalists who are
unbelievably fast problem solvers. I'm not going to say that's a
generalizeable statement. It's not, and that's the point -- it's a side effect
of spending a career working in teams where people care more about playing
with their kids or doing research or whatever than open source.

It's not even that they don't work on projects in their spare time. They do,
but they're not part of open source culture, where people share things by
default. They're satisfied with having made the thing itself, and they're not
going to put their hardware or software project on github any sooner than
they're going to make a website for the house they built from scratch.

If you work at an open source shop and hire with this attitude, all you're
going to do is make sure that you have a monoculture in this dimension. That's
not the worst thing in the world, but it filters out people who don't
particularly care about open source, which is the majority of programmers. If
that's a moral imperative for you, I don't have any objection to that.
Otherwise, I don't see why you'd want to do this.

~~~
colin_mccabe
"Playing with your kids" is not mutually exclusive with doing open source
work. Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) is a father and so is Doug Cutting,
founder of Hadoop.

"Doing research" is not mutually exclusive with doing open source work either.
In fact, I think these days, I would be suspicious of a systems software
research project that didn't release the code. A lot of systems software
research projects use Linux or some other open source code base as a starting
point, since re-inventing the wheel is not very conducive to publishing
quickly.

It's pretty obvious why companies would want to look at open source
contributions. They show that someone works well on a team, is motivated, and
can write code. Of course, they're not ever going to be the only thing
companies consider.

 _It 's not even that they don't work on projects in their spare time. They
do, but they're not part of open source culture, where people share things by
default. They're satisfied with having made the thing itself, and they're not
going to put their hardware or software project on github any sooner than
they're going to make a website for the house they built from scratch._

How do you know they work on projects in their spare time? Is it because they
shared them with you?

~~~
hibbelig
> "Playing with your kids" is not mutually exclusive with doing open source
> work. Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) is a father and so is Doug Cutting,
> founder of Hadoop.

I think the context here is doing Open Source work in one's spare time. And I
guess that Linus does it mostly during the daytime. (I think his diving
software thing has probably been done in the spare time, though.)

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mattgreenrocks
"Hiring is so hard, so burn your free time to help me!"

Please don't contribute to OSS unless you really want to. It's great if you
do. But making it a near-mandatory requirement just means that it drives yet
more self-promotion (it isn't a _real_ project unless you buy a domain!), more
low quality contributions, and, ultimately, becomes yet another thing-you-
really-should-be-doing.

~~~
gmac
It doesn't have to be contributing to existing open source projects. I always
find it a bit surprising when other programmers have no code to show on Github
or similar, for this reason: 1. most people who use computers day in, day out,
encounter a pain point or two with the tools they use; 2. as a programmer, it
seems natural to fix that pain point; 3. once fixed, it seems natural to share
the fix, so that others are helped too (and that can also help post-hoc
justify/rationalise the investment of time!).

~~~
ptr
You're forgetting the work that's needed to make it production (or at least
more production) ready and the maintenance. A fix is often just made "good
enough" for oneself in my experience. It's like sharing your dot files.

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33a
I really hope this doesn't become a thing. We don't need a bunch of perverse
incentives pushing people to write open source like academics are forced to
churn out papers.

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badman_ting
As noted, it's expensive. I've encountered potential employers who were
lukewarm because I hadn't done enough work in open repos to impress them.
That's understandable, it is rational to tend towards "no" instead of "yes"
when evaluating developers. But to me it seems strange to do open source work
just to be more attractive to employers. So I guess it really is an honest
signal. I'm not going out of my way to do a bunch of stuff to impress you
because I already have a good job, so you could be ignoring good candidates
with this mindset. But like I mentioned, some people might be OK with that.

~~~
Bahamut
As someone who does contribute a bunch to open source, it does make me a bit
wary - I've met some excellent developers who do very little open source
development and who I have learned a lot from while working with them.

Personally, I contribute to open source because I want to see things fixed and
generally want to move fast since that's how I operate. Sometimes this has
meant figuring out fixes myself and opening up a pull request. I see this as a
way of helping projects I like move forward since they can focus less on bugs
and more on feature development.

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Linell
How can someone who _has_ time and _could_ be that "fit gazelle" get into
contributing to open source?

I have tried several times. At least, I've looked at a few of the suggestions
on how to get started. All of the ideas don't quite work, though. Namely
because most of the suggestions are things that I've either never even heard
of or that I do not use. The gardening approach mentioned not long ago on this
site seems very good for beginners - but I feel that just jumping in and
starting with this could be a bad thing if the organization already has some
sort of system set up.

For example, I have used Express. I don't really understand it well enough,
and I've never had reason to, jump into the source code. There are only ten
open issues. For just about every open source thing I've used, this is the
case. Am I just doing something wrong?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Don't force it. If the itch isn't there, don't scratch it.

Instead, look for things that are interesting to you, follow your passion; if
that eventually leads to an OSS project (either your own or helping on an
existing one), great! Just avoid toxic startup cultures that require forced
OSS track records and then provide "unlimited" vacations.

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IndieDevClub
I don't think it has to be open-source... you just need to release things.

And what's a great motivator for releasing things when working alone? It's
having other people expect you to make progress on your projects. That's why I
made a club that meets weekly to screenshare what we're working on.

It's the benefits of YCombinator weekly dinners, without the benefit of
awesome speakers, great advice, or mentorship. But I'm there! If you want to
get feedback on your projects and give feedback on other people's projects,
then you should join my club.

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lightblade
People, please keep in mind that "contributing" is not just limited to pull
requests. I would consider filing bug reports, answer SO questions, and
participate in IRC to be contributing.

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QuantumChaos
Is it dedication that is being signaled here, or intelligence? Open source can
also be a signal that you get you work done quick enough that you have time
for hobbies.

~~~
elohesra
Or, to play devil's advocate, that you aren't putting in the level of work in
your day job that you could be putting in. If I were an employer looking at a
candidate and I saw they had huge amounts of open source contributions, the
first thing I'd ask is "how did you have time for this and your day job?".

It also tells you something else about a candidate: that their previous job
probably wasn't particularly hard or that they didn't have much in the way of
responsibilities. If you're the lead developer on a several hundred thousand
line codebase, it seems less likely that you have time to build an open source
resume than if you were a junior developer.

Honestly, I think open source is a bit of a mixed signal. If the code shown in
the repositories is great, then that's fantastic, but if it's merely average
then I think it makes you look worse than just not having it there at all.
This is really my biggest objection with open source: if you want to use it as
some sort of resume, then you have to contribute huge amounts of time to it in
order to make it representative of your skill. Then it's no longer an open
source project you do for fun, but just a second day job. Additionally, when
it gets good enough for an employer to see, what interviewer is going to have
time to read through it? This problem is magnified especially when developers
start treating open source as a form of resume, and interviewers have to wade
through shockingly poor repositories from every candidate to determine the
candidate's quality.

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ExpiredLink
> _The uploader has not made this video available in your country._

> _Sorry about that._

Sorry about you, BBC.

