8 ms·

I think this article is detached from reality. Most people who contribute to OS are on low income, unemployed or students. Top developers in banks and startups

by jkot 10y ago

I think this article is detached from reality. Most people who contribute to OS are on low income, unemployed or students. Top developers in banks and startups dont have time for that, or are forbidden by their company. Being "top developer" is one of the most family friendly jobs that ever existed. You can work remotely at your own time. I quit cubicle and started working on opensource because I had family. > you might develop a mental illness, like depression, Many people in IT are a bit weird. Again its one of the most friendly jobs that exists. Developer does not even have to speak to people, all can be done via email. > 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to "buy" more free time Good old racism and man hate is doing just fine.

manmal 10y ago
Do you have little kids? If yes, how many hours can you cut off daily without feeling bad for not spending time with them?
- jkot 10y ago
  All hours? Sometimes I code with a baby on my lap. They are in next room when I take break. And little baby sleeps like 16 hours a day. It has some trade-offs, we dont have a car or macbooks, but it works just fine.
  - the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
    > And little baby sleeps like 16 hours a day. That will end soon :)
    - stedaniels 10y ago
      Reading jkot's comments in not sure who's disconnected from reality. I do love coming across people who think they are doing things right and normal, everyone must think the same as then. Such ignorance is always astonishing. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
      - jkot 10y ago
        And which part exactly is disconnected from reality? Developers have it pretty well with family time even in 9-5 job. My friend works on boat and is away from home 6 months every year. My other friend works is truck driver and is home on weekends, if he is lucky. I did my math and I decided to value family time over income. Part of that was moving to cheaper area to reduce expenses and to be with grandparents. Finding remote work is quite easy if you made some tradeoffs. I said article is disconnected from reality, because it does not handle basic math. Somehow it expects everything without any sacrifices or trade-offs. Part about not sacrificing your hobbies on top of job and family is best example. And when that does not work, blame is on people who did not even started their own family yet.
        fasouto 10y ago
        You are comparing software developers with truck drivers or sailors, professions that require traveling long distances. That's ridiculous.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      No doubt. My wife and I are fostering twin 2 yr olds. There's no way I could code with them both here. Adorable, but in to everything. :)
  - radicalbyte 10y ago
    It worked great for me with one kid, but with a baby and 2.5 year-old it's impossible. Sometimes caring for both together as one person is impossible (i.e. if both are ill). My son was amazing, he slept 16 hours, giving me 5-6 hours during the day and 2-3 in the evenings to work. Working at the same time was great. My daughter however sleeps very erratically alone, however she sleeps OK on a person. So you have a baby in your arms for 9 hours of the day and a toddler running around causing mayhem (and demanding attention). So, yeah, if you're lucky then it works. Those sleeps will stop though, with my son he was sleeping 4hrs / day up until he was 26 months. Which is about as long as I lasted having a work-at-home day :)
    - jon-wood 10y ago
      It's doable so long as everyone involved is bought in. We have a two and a bit year old and I work from home full time, with the odd visit to the office for planning sessions. The reason it works is that my wife treats me being in my study in much the same way she would me being in an office elsewhere, but with the perks of me being able to see her and our son when I come out to make some tea or have lunch, and without any commute time. If you don't have a space in the home which you can close the door on and call work being remote isn't going to last long.
      - radicalbyte 10y ago
        Ahh, you're not looking after the kids, your wife is :) We both work, originally full time, but now 4 days a week.
        jon-wood 10y ago
        It's not quite that simple - I work weekdays, my wife works Thursday, Friday, Saturday, with her Mum looking after our son on Thursday and Friday. On Saturdays I look after him. Honestly I have no idea how anyone could expect to be able to work at the same time as looking after a two year old, I've done it once while my brother came over to entertain him, and even then it was just barely viable. Young children just don't understand the concept of someone being present in the room but not able to pay attention to them.
  - manmal 10y ago
    Yes, in German we have a saying like "One kid is no kid". The increase from zero to one kid might feel like you mastered a big step (and it is!).. But a second kid is a total game changer. I am hard pressed to find some time for Netflix and a bit of guitar playing every once in a while. Do I want to exchange that for coding for some bigger cause? Nope.
    - mac01021 10y ago
      Why is the jump from 1 to 2 bigger than the jump from 0 to 1?
      - manmal 10y ago
        Because it has the potential of reserving nearly all of your leisure time over months-years. Caring for a baby while a crazy 3 year old wants to play/eat/fight can be overwhelming compared to just one kid. There's also the organizational side - every step outside the door becomes an endeavour. Then there is housing - good luck with that 100 sq feet apartment (it could work with one kid, but impossible with two). Same with small cars - forget them with a 2nd kid.
      - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        The progression is not linear. It is exponential in terms of time.
        lrem 10y ago
        There was a post here a few months(?) ago from a guy describing his life with his over ten kids. I'm pretty sure he doesn't spend x*2^10 hours per day on them ;)
        gerrys0 10y ago
        The hardest is from 2 to 3. After 3, the acceleration goes down. It kind of goes like this (x-axis is # of kids): | ||| |||||| ||||||||||
TickleSteve 10y ago
Despite rumours to the contrary... remote working is still a very small minority of coding work. The overwhelming majority of coding work (at whatever level, top or bottom) is carried out 9-5 in offices. Also "top developer" != "open source developer".
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Yep! It angries me that I always have to fight for remote work, but it is not a problem for the teams down the corridor that just outsourced the work somewhere in this universe.
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    IME, outsourcing works because you get (most) management onus placed on the outsourcer. Remote workers with in-office management doesn't feature that.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Having been part of outsourced projects since 2008,I would say that is a nice theory. You require the same amount of in-office management. Every time that management decided as you say, they got something else as delivery.
      - galdosdi 10y ago
        So true. In fact, it can be even worse managing an outsourcer style vendor, since the natural industry pressures lead to outsourcers being very incentivized to find the very minimum possible effort they can spend on a client project without losing the contract. As a result, getting more effort out of an outsourcer may feel as annoying as getting your insurance company to approve your claim -- their entire company culture/process has evolved and/or been designed to prevent this. By contrast, individual employees (remote or otherwise) might get lazy or burnt out or have personal problems or something, but few of them are actually Wally from Dilbert, using all their available effort to avoid having to make any effort
jwdunne 10y ago
It's funny actually. I recently heard a GCHQ radio ad for a software development role. The entire pitch was the nature of work preventing it from being taken home and as a result enjoying family time.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  That's really clever. I'd have never thought about that lol.
partycoder 10y ago
Some projects are pet projects. What people do when they want to polish their skills. Other people do it as a day job. Other people do it in combination with a paper... Then, companies might open source software if that software doesn't represent a competitive advantage. Other do it to improve their chances to be hired (github as resume)....
spraak 10y ago
Lol wut? How us that racist? Or, how is that stopping 20 year old white guys from living their life? There's no system in place to crush young white males from doing what they want. But for women and other non binary genders and POC, yes, there is.
bad_user 10y ago
I'm from Romania, Europe. Don't know what a "top developer" is, but I'm not unemployed, I'm not a student, I have a wife and a son and I'm not low income, in fact being paid at least 4x the national average for software developers, my salary being on equal footing with the US, not the Bay Area mind you, but given the high cost of life there, my income is higher relative to where I live. And I also contribute open source, a lot by my standards. Yes my company allows open source because it is in our interest. We are contractors you see, open source bringing us visibility. I would say that open source is the reason for why I can have earnings higher than average, for one because my projects shine brighter than any resume (and I have a decent resume as well), because being able to show working code counts more than stories, but also because my work has transformed me from a full stack developer to one that is also specialized on more niche problems. Like I don't shine if you make me query MySQL, but I'm worth it if you make me handle problems of distributed systems. But I'm not going to lie to you. It's freaking hard and it does end up eating into your family life, even though most open source I do is for helping at work and done during work hours when it's justifiable. I'm not able to sustain a constant pace. I can't do it without risking burnout. Hence I'm not one of those folks that commit every day. I can have entire months without contributions. But then when I do have contributions, shit gets serious, or in other words I finish was I start.
- hk__2 10y ago
  > I'm not low income, in fact being paid at least 4x the national average for software developers Out of curiosity, what is the average salary for software developers in Romania?
  - je42 10y ago
    It's obvious. Take Bay Area average divide by 4 ;)
  - a_imho 10y ago
    I can only speak for Hungary, it should be pretty similar, figures per month gross, net is ~2/3 of that, rough estimates as follows minimum wage $300 average wage $900 (official statistics for 2016 Q1) fresh graduate developer $1000 3-5 years of experience $2000-$3000 Can't speak for top engineers, but it would be surprising if more than a couple earns over $6000, it flats out pretty fast.
imechura 10y ago
> Top developers in banks and startups dont have time for that Sorry to disagree but I have spent my whole 15 year career as a developer at banks and many fortune 50/100 companies and I can tell you for certain that most developers in these extremely high paying corporate jobs, including the developers do rarely do any software development or practice outside of the office. Keep in mind that most of these jobs require a decade or more of experience so most of these folks have wives, children, 4k sq. ft. homes with swimming pools and all of the collective responsibilities that go along with those things. Consequently, their managers are in the same position so it almost never expected that anyone regularly sacrifices their family life for work related activities outside of times when it's absolutely necessary. Successful, established and non-software companies rarely ever implement bleeding edge technology. In fact most of these companies have EA departments that forbid the use of anything outside of the approved, vetted technology stack without a specific approved exception. What I've seen in these teams is that there is little emphasis on learning new technology like what I see as the standard requirements in HN lately. Developers instead set themselves apart by (and are interviewed/hired for) consistently demonstrating exceptional/outstanding: -problem solving -critical thinking -customer focused behavior -core enginerring skills -business domain/political accumen -leadership and mentorship Only a couple times have I reviewed an employee performance appraisal that contained management directives related to lack of software skills and I have reviewed thousands of them to date. I have personally interviewed and hired hundreds of elite software engineers for salaries of well over six figures and I can guaranty you that the question of emerging technologies is only discussed if the candidate brings it up or specifically has it on their resume. The recent stories about complex technical algorithmic interviews that I hear about on HN are nothing like most big corporations interviews. The good corporations hire good people knowing that skills change and can be trained. As a mater of fact, I know several elite level software engineers at top US companies that if presented with the startup style interview process would either fail miserably or would be so completely insulted by the process and hubris that they would decline to proceed with the interview(then go across the street to a fortune 50 and easily collect 225k with benefits). TL;DR: The majority of elite U.S. software development jobs are nothing like the working conditions often described on HN.
- lr4444lr 10y ago
andrei_says_ 10y ago
>> 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to "buy" more free time >Good old racism and man hate is doing just fine. Allow me to point out that racism usually applies to people who are experiencing oppression because of not being white. This has to do with a society which has created structures and institutions that give white people privilege at the expense of everyone else. Same goes for sexism. Thus, white males live at the top of a pyramid of oppression, without seeing it. Privilege is transparent for the privileged. It's like playing a game on easy and wondering why everyone else is complaining. Well, other people are playing at different difficulty -- people of color on "hard" and "berserk" modes, women of color on "insanely hard." And they don't get to choose their level. This is why, as a white male, I try to not get defensive and blame the ones who point out the existing institutionalized oppression in being "(reverse) racist" or "man-hating".
jcoffland 10y ago
"Most people who contribute to OS are on low income, unemployed or students. Top developers in banks and startups dont have time for that, or are forbidden by their company." This is so incredibly false. Many Open-Source devs are top programmers with real lives. I find that the corporate world's so called experts are usually the disappointing ones. In the corporate world becoming a guru is more of a political game than anything. In the Open-Source world, it's "show me the code" or GTFO.
sklogic 10y ago
I was under impression that most of the OSS contributors are full time paid employees. Projects like gcc, llvm, linux kernel, etc. are all corporate work.
novel 10y ago
>> > 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to "buy" more free time > Good old racism and man hate is doing just fine. This is a strange generalization indeed. Esp. considering that the post author maintains an active technical blog and speaks at events (I assume these activities take about the same amount of resources as hobby open source development). PS I don't know a lot of open source developers in person, and just identify them by name, communication and the code. However, the ones I happened to talk with on broader topics, usually happen to be older than 20. Also, I'm not sure how, and, most importantly, why I would question about their responsibilities though...

by jkot 10y ago

manmal 10y ago

Do you have little kids? If yes, how many hours can you cut off daily without feeling bad for not spending time with them?

jkot 10y ago
All hours? Sometimes I code with a baby on my lap. They are in next room when I take break. And little baby sleeps like 16 hours a day. It has some trade-offs, we dont have a car or macbooks, but it works just fine.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
  > And little baby sleeps like 16 hours a day. That will end soon :)
  - stedaniels 10y ago
    Reading jkot's comments in not sure who's disconnected from reality. I do love coming across people who think they are doing things right and normal, everyone must think the same as then. Such ignorance is always astonishing. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
    - jkot 10y ago
      And which part exactly is disconnected from reality? Developers have it pretty well with family time even in 9-5 job. My friend works on boat and is away from home 6 months every year. My other friend works is truck driver and is home on weekends, if he is lucky. I did my math and I decided to value family time over income. Part of that was moving to cheaper area to reduce expenses and to be with grandparents. Finding remote work is quite easy if you made some tradeoffs. I said article is disconnected from reality, because it does not handle basic math. Somehow it expects everything without any sacrifices or trade-offs. Part about not sacrificing your hobbies on top of job and family is best example. And when that does not work, blame is on people who did not even started their own family yet.
      - fasouto 10y ago
        You are comparing software developers with truck drivers or sailors, professions that require traveling long distances. That's ridiculous.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    No doubt. My wife and I are fostering twin 2 yr olds. There's no way I could code with them both here. Adorable, but in to everything. :)
- radicalbyte 10y ago
  It worked great for me with one kid, but with a baby and 2.5 year-old it's impossible. Sometimes caring for both together as one person is impossible (i.e. if both are ill). My son was amazing, he slept 16 hours, giving me 5-6 hours during the day and 2-3 in the evenings to work. Working at the same time was great. My daughter however sleeps very erratically alone, however she sleeps OK on a person. So you have a baby in your arms for 9 hours of the day and a toddler running around causing mayhem (and demanding attention). So, yeah, if you're lucky then it works. Those sleeps will stop though, with my son he was sleeping 4hrs / day up until he was 26 months. Which is about as long as I lasted having a work-at-home day :)
  - jon-wood 10y ago
    It's doable so long as everyone involved is bought in. We have a two and a bit year old and I work from home full time, with the odd visit to the office for planning sessions. The reason it works is that my wife treats me being in my study in much the same way she would me being in an office elsewhere, but with the perks of me being able to see her and our son when I come out to make some tea or have lunch, and without any commute time. If you don't have a space in the home which you can close the door on and call work being remote isn't going to last long.
    - radicalbyte 10y ago
      Ahh, you're not looking after the kids, your wife is :) We both work, originally full time, but now 4 days a week.
      - jon-wood 10y ago
        It's not quite that simple - I work weekdays, my wife works Thursday, Friday, Saturday, with her Mum looking after our son on Thursday and Friday. On Saturdays I look after him. Honestly I have no idea how anyone could expect to be able to work at the same time as looking after a two year old, I've done it once while my brother came over to entertain him, and even then it was just barely viable. Young children just don't understand the concept of someone being present in the room but not able to pay attention to them.
- manmal 10y ago
  Yes, in German we have a saying like "One kid is no kid". The increase from zero to one kid might feel like you mastered a big step (and it is!).. But a second kid is a total game changer. I am hard pressed to find some time for Netflix and a bit of guitar playing every once in a while. Do I want to exchange that for coding for some bigger cause? Nope.
  - mac01021 10y ago
    Why is the jump from 1 to 2 bigger than the jump from 0 to 1?
    - manmal 10y ago
      Because it has the potential of reserving nearly all of your leisure time over months-years. Caring for a baby while a crazy 3 year old wants to play/eat/fight can be overwhelming compared to just one kid. There's also the organizational side - every step outside the door becomes an endeavour. Then there is housing - good luck with that 100 sq feet apartment (it could work with one kid, but impossible with two). Same with small cars - forget them with a 2nd kid.
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      The progression is not linear. It is exponential in terms of time.
      - lrem 10y ago
        There was a post here a few months(?) ago from a guy describing his life with his over ten kids. I'm pretty sure he doesn't spend x*2^10 hours per day on them ;)
        gerrys0 10y ago
        The hardest is from 2 to 3. After 3, the acceleration goes down. It kind of goes like this (x-axis is # of kids): | ||| |||||| ||||||||||

TickleSteve 10y ago

Despite rumours to the contrary... remote working is still a very small minority of coding work. The overwhelming majority of coding work (at whatever level, top or bottom) is carried out 9-5 in offices. Also "top developer" != "open source developer".

pjmlp 10y ago
Yep! It angries me that I always have to fight for remote work, but it is not a problem for the teams down the corridor that just outsourced the work somewhere in this universe.
- sokoloff 10y ago
  IME, outsourcing works because you get (most) management onus placed on the outsourcer. Remote workers with in-office management doesn't feature that.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Having been part of outsourced projects since 2008,I would say that is a nice theory. You require the same amount of in-office management. Every time that management decided as you say, they got something else as delivery.
    - galdosdi 10y ago
      So true. In fact, it can be even worse managing an outsourcer style vendor, since the natural industry pressures lead to outsourcers being very incentivized to find the very minimum possible effort they can spend on a client project without losing the contract. As a result, getting more effort out of an outsourcer may feel as annoying as getting your insurance company to approve your claim -- their entire company culture/process has evolved and/or been designed to prevent this. By contrast, individual employees (remote or otherwise) might get lazy or burnt out or have personal problems or something, but few of them are actually Wally from Dilbert, using all their available effort to avoid having to make any effort

jwdunne 10y ago

It's funny actually. I recently heard a GCHQ radio ad for a software development role. The entire pitch was the nature of work preventing it from being taken home and as a result enjoying family time.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
That's really clever. I'd have never thought about that lol.

partycoder 10y ago

Some projects are pet projects. What people do when they want to polish their skills. Other people do it as a day job. Other people do it in combination with a paper... Then, companies might open source software if that software doesn't represent a competitive advantage. Other do it to improve their chances to be hired (github as resume)....

spraak 10y ago

Lol wut? How us that racist? Or, how is that stopping 20 year old white guys from living their life? There's no system in place to crush young white males from doing what they want. But for women and other non binary genders and POC, yes, there is.

bad_user 10y ago

I'm from Romania, Europe. Don't know what a "top developer" is, but I'm not unemployed, I'm not a student, I have a wife and a son and I'm not low income, in fact being paid at least 4x the national average for software developers, my salary being on equal footing with the US, not the Bay Area mind you, but given the high cost of life there, my income is higher relative to where I live. And I also contribute open source, a lot by my standards. Yes my company allows open source because it is in our interest. We are contractors you see, open source bringing us visibility. I would say that open source is the reason for why I can have earnings higher than average, for one because my projects shine brighter than any resume (and I have a decent resume as well), because being able to show working code counts more than stories, but also because my work has transformed me from a full stack developer to one that is also specialized on more niche problems. Like I don't shine if you make me query MySQL, but I'm worth it if you make me handle problems of distributed systems. But I'm not going to lie to you. It's freaking hard and it does end up eating into your family life, even though most open source I do is for helping at work and done during work hours when it's justifiable. I'm not able to sustain a constant pace. I can't do it without risking burnout. Hence I'm not one of those folks that commit every day. I can have entire months without contributions. But then when I do have contributions, shit gets serious, or in other words I finish was I start.

hk__2 10y ago
> I'm not low income, in fact being paid at least 4x the national average for software developers Out of curiosity, what is the average salary for software developers in Romania?
- je42 10y ago
  It's obvious. Take Bay Area average divide by 4 ;)
- a_imho 10y ago
  I can only speak for Hungary, it should be pretty similar, figures per month gross, net is ~2/3 of that, rough estimates as follows minimum wage $300 average wage $900 (official statistics for 2016 Q1) fresh graduate developer $1000 3-5 years of experience $2000-$3000 Can't speak for top engineers, but it would be surprising if more than a couple earns over $6000, it flats out pretty fast.

imechura 10y ago

> Top developers in banks and startups dont have time for that Sorry to disagree but I have spent my whole 15 year career as a developer at banks and many fortune 50/100 companies and I can tell you for certain that most developers in these extremely high paying corporate jobs, including the developers do rarely do any software development or practice outside of the office. Keep in mind that most of these jobs require a decade or more of experience so most of these folks have wives, children, 4k sq. ft. homes with swimming pools and all of the collective responsibilities that go along with those things. Consequently, their managers are in the same position so it almost never expected that anyone regularly sacrifices their family life for work related activities outside of times when it's absolutely necessary. Successful, established and non-software companies rarely ever implement bleeding edge technology. In fact most of these companies have EA departments that forbid the use of anything outside of the approved, vetted technology stack without a specific approved exception. What I've seen in these teams is that there is little emphasis on learning new technology like what I see as the standard requirements in HN lately. Developers instead set themselves apart by (and are interviewed/hired for) consistently demonstrating exceptional/outstanding: -problem solving -critical thinking -customer focused behavior -core enginerring skills -business domain/political accumen -leadership and mentorship Only a couple times have I reviewed an employee performance appraisal that contained management directives related to lack of software skills and I have reviewed thousands of them to date. I have personally interviewed and hired hundreds of elite software engineers for salaries of well over six figures and I can guaranty you that the question of emerging technologies is only discussed if the candidate brings it up or specifically has it on their resume. The recent stories about complex technical algorithmic interviews that I hear about on HN are nothing like most big corporations interviews. The good corporations hire good people knowing that skills change and can be trained. As a mater of fact, I know several elite level software engineers at top US companies that if presented with the startup style interview process would either fail miserably or would be so completely insulted by the process and hubris that they would decline to proceed with the interview(then go across the street to a fortune 50 and easily collect 225k with benefits). TL;DR: The majority of elite U.S. software development jobs are nothing like the working conditions often described on HN.

lr4444lr 10y ago

andrei_says_ 10y ago

>> 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to "buy" more free time >Good old racism and man hate is doing just fine. Allow me to point out that racism usually applies to people who are experiencing oppression because of not being white. This has to do with a society which has created structures and institutions that give white people privilege at the expense of everyone else. Same goes for sexism. Thus, white males live at the top of a pyramid of oppression, without seeing it. Privilege is transparent for the privileged. It's like playing a game on easy and wondering why everyone else is complaining. Well, other people are playing at different difficulty -- people of color on "hard" and "berserk" modes, women of color on "insanely hard." And they don't get to choose their level. This is why, as a white male, I try to not get defensive and blame the ones who point out the existing institutionalized oppression in being "(reverse) racist" or "man-hating".

jcoffland 10y ago

"Most people who contribute to OS are on low income, unemployed or students. Top developers in banks and startups dont have time for that, or are forbidden by their company." This is so incredibly false. Many Open-Source devs are top programmers with real lives. I find that the corporate world's so called experts are usually the disappointing ones. In the corporate world becoming a guru is more of a political game than anything. In the Open-Source world, it's "show me the code" or GTFO.

sklogic 10y ago

I was under impression that most of the OSS contributors are full time paid employees. Projects like gcc, llvm, linux kernel, etc. are all corporate work.

novel 10y ago

>> > 20-year-old white guys with no responsibilities and/or with enough income to "buy" more free time > Good old racism and man hate is doing just fine. This is a strange generalization indeed. Esp. considering that the post author maintains an active technical blog and speaks at events (I assume these activities take about the same amount of resources as hobby open source development). PS I don't know a lot of open source developers in person, and just identify them by name, communication and the code. However, the ones I happened to talk with on broader topics, usually happen to be older than 20. Also, I'm not sure how, and, most importantly, why I would question about their responsibilities though...