Contributing patches to Rails is exactly what I am thinking of when I say this: it is a lot of work, visibility for new contributors is poor, and the main beneficiaries are going to be for-profit businesses. Yet I hear otherwise very savvy people telling unemployed CS grads that they should build up their github profiles by, e.g., doing patches to Rails. That strikes me as an astoundingly poor use of one's time -- you don't have a coding problem, you have a marketing problem. Patches have a very poor ROI for personal marketing.
Hmmm. If someone put on their CV that they got patches into Rails (or another large, popular OSS project) you wouldn't think of that as a pretty big plus?
Relative to what? I'd think of it as a big plus compared to a guy who never contributed to anything outside of his immediate job duties. I wouldn't think of it as a big plus compared to someone who started Rails, or who wrote Mongrel, or who founded his own startup, or even someone who worked for Google or PayPal.
I suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Even though I know intellectually that getting patches into Rails now is probably harder than starting Rails was, I'm still more impressed by the guy who started Rails.
I don't mean contributing patches to Rails, I mean writing Rails. Or contributing features to projects that are viewed as bit more hard-core, eg. Apache or Python, though even there you're often better-off starting a new project than contributing to an existing one.
There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects. But as long as it exists, I'm going to exploit it, and do high-visibility but useless projects like port Arc to JavaScript or rewrite Tetris in 3 hours instead of contributing patches to JQuery.
>> There seems to be a general cognitive bias in the programming world against maintenance work, which strikes me as a bit dumb because it's both harder and more important than starting new projects.
This is not unique to the programming world. Starting something and finishing it looks a lot more impressive almost evrywhere than making something that exis´ts better. Just think how much more impressive founding yet another non-profit looks on ones cv compared to doubling the projects of an existing one.
