
Self-Taught Software Engineers: Why Open Source Is Important to Us - nreece
https://medium.com/rocknnull/self-taught-software-engineers-why-open-source-is-important-to-us-fe2a3473a576
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faitswulff
> I then created a new repository on GitHub and created my own network scanner
> for iOS called MMLanScan (The reason I didn’t create a pull request back to
> original project it’s because it was abandoned).

This seems a bit like his early attempts to sell free Ubuntu discs. Hopefully
he got the wording slightly wrong and forked it instead of starting a brand
new repository with no attribution.

~~~
myhf
[https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-
sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

~~~
andrewflnr
That was fascinating, but I don't quite see the application here.

~~~
digi_owl
If what the grandparent comment pointed out was deliberate rather than a goof
by a inexperienced developer, then it steps right into the sociopath box.

And frankly the article is so relevant to current goings on in the FOSS world
that it hurts reading it.

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bigger_cheese
Slightly off topic but one thing I've long been curious about is what are the
requirements to call yourself 'software engineer' as a job title?

In many parts of the world claiming to be an engineer (in a professional
capacity) without the required qualifications opens you (and your employer) up
to all sorts of liability issues.

I am a Materials Engineer I've long suspected the software engineer title is
not regulated anywhere near as heavily.

~~~
mgkimsal
AFAIK, it's not regulated at all - certainly nowhere in the US that I've
lived.

But... I don't call myself a materials engineer, which probably has some sort
of licensing or regulation, no?

~~~
bigger_cheese
It was more of a curiosity mostly centered around liability. I was curious for
example what happens if you write a piece of safety critical software and it
fails. Can you be found at fault as the author? Where does the responsibility
lie is it with your employer who hired you on the presumption of
qualifications?

~~~
trprog
>who hired you on the presumption of qualifications?

This whole line of thinking doesn't really apply to software development.
Formal qualifications are, at best, only required to get you a first
interview. Formal software development qualifications are generally regarded
as being only tangentially related to the ability to do the job.

~~~
bigger_cheese
How do companies avoid being found negligent i.e. Could a company be sued for
hiring someone grossly incompetent on the basis they did not vet the employees
competence?

I'd always presumed there were similar requirements (i.e open source licenses
often disclaim liability for code released under them)

~~~
trprog
>Could a company be sued for hiring someone grossly incompetent on the basis
they did not vet the employees competence?

Not sure. I have personally never heard of it but that is hardly conclusive.

Its not the kind of job where individuals are out making decisions on their
own as a rule. Particularly at established companies people's work likely has
to pass assorted automated tests and rounds of human review and testing. And
then the companies software is wrapped in extremely carefully worded licences
and contracts to limit liability.

Also bear in mind that software is typically produced behind closed doors. The
external users of the software likely have no idea as to the identities of the
humans producing the software they use. You would never know if someone
incompetent was hired (assuming their poor quality work somehow got released)
because you don't know if the software is being produced by 1 or 100 humans.

------
Walkman
The biggest barrier of contributing back is that it takes a lot of time and
effort (even for small projects) which you are not obliged to make. A lot of
the time the driver for contribution is only the person's internal belief that
he/she has to do it and honestly sometimes even when you want to contribute
back, you don't have enough time or energy after 8+ hours of work.

It can be a big difference if the library author allows contributions much-
much easier to make.

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cdevs
I learned a lot about what I was lacking or what was expected of me in early
interviews, it's as if we need a few more blogs like this and some transcribed
interviews to prepare people for those "oh shoot I forgot to learn something
simple" moments. It's going to happen for college kids and self thought no
matter what. If this were a intern job he would have still gotten it and been
trained on git. The OS X time machine reply is priceless though...I can
remember the copy a folder for backup every hour programming days...horrible
times:)

------
saurabhjha
Some open source projects have "Easy to Fix" issues to get people on the roll
(like Scikit-Learn), but many don't.

Some have overview of their source code and their design principles (like
Redis) but many don't.

Some have good documentation of how to get your patches in main tree but many
(especially those not hosted on github) don't have it.

Most notably for C/C++ projects, the undocumented dependencies to build the
library can waste hours at a time.

Open source is great (I have contributed to a couple of projects) but not all
projects are equal in terms of quality/easy-to-hack.

Brad Fitzpatrick has also written quite a bit about this
[http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html](http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html)

