7 ms·

Programmers are a weird bunch. Look at stackoverflow for example. Thousands of programmers giving away their professional advice, spending their valuable time…

Programmers are a weird bunch. Look at stackoverflow for example. Thousands of programmers giving away their professional advice, spending their valuable time…for what exactly? Imaginary internet points? Open source is another one: here’s my code that I’ve worked so hard on, spent countless hours on - please have it for free, my labor is worthless. It’s like they’re actively seeking to bring their own value down.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
The only explanations I can think of are (1) altruism, (2) intent to profit from one's reputation, and (3) simply enjoying puzzle solving. Am I missing any? And are any of them so strange?
- staticassertion 5y ago
  (2) And (3) aren't strange and are very likely the main drivers. It isn't hard to imagine that humans, and really any intelligent life, have evolved to enjoy problem solving and structure incentives around being good at it.
- icoder 5y ago
  Do not underestimate how much you can learn from teaching / explaining something (you think you already know) to someone else.
  - rapnie 5y ago
    Learning in public [0], discussed on HN before. [0] https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/ https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/
- oefnak 5y ago
  For me it is contributing to a project that has helped me too. For every useful answer I received on stack overflow I've answered some questions myself.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    Interesting. I wonder whether "repaying a debt you feel but are under no legal obligation to repay" should qualify as altruism. (It feels altruistic to me.)
sidlls 5y ago
And then they complain bitterly when commercial entities use it without contributing back, treat workers poorly, and all that. It's not weirdness; it's ignorance and/or stupidity.
jhgb 5y ago
> please have it for free, my labor is worthless. That's weird logic. Presumably you wouldn't create something you consider worthless - you'd create it because you needed it.
- eigenhombre 5y ago
  Or because the act of creation is pleasurable in and of itself.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sudosysgen 5y ago
Programmers aren't unique in thagt. If you create the right conditions, driven people will just work for the sake of it, if it can help someone or create something beautiful. It's the reason why us humans are where we are to begin with.
- ansible 5y ago
  This is what a post-scarcity society is supposed to be. A world where everyone has enough, and they do things (programming, art, whatever) for the joy of it.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Yes, programming producing products that have zero marginal cost gives us a glimpse of what the future may look like - either the open source volunteer future, or the neofeudal artificially locked down future.
imnotlost 5y ago
Philip Glass talks about this exact thing here: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/philip-glass-on-controlling-your-output-and-getting-paid-for-what-you-make/ https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/philip-glass-on-co...
- hkt 5y ago
  That link is amazing. Maybe my reply is off topic, but Glass is an extraordinary composer and it is always a pleasure to see him referenced saliently like this. Thanks!
meh99 5y ago
Humans were giving away their service to the church for promises of forever life. Mass delusions are easy to propagate as they require little emotional nuance; a salute, tattoo, incantation… those used to be enough to bind large groups. Groups are out though. We’re leaning into enabling humans as atomic agents and automating away the utilitarian social obligations, and work of biological survival to get there.
jasode 5y ago
>Thousands of programmers giving away their professional advice, spending their valuable time…for what exactly? Imaginary internet points? Before Stackoverflow, people were answering questions on USENET newsgroups without any award of points. And before USENET and the internet, hobbyists would gather to trade advice on building home computers. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club The common theme isn't the points... it's that people like to be helpful and share knowledge. >Open source is another one: here’s my code that I’ve worked so hard on, spent countless hours on - please have it for free, my labor is worthless. There are multiple motivations for open source. In my case, I did it because I could get more value from the community's enhancements than the "free code" the community got from me. >It’s like they’re actively seeking to bring their own value down. Neither of your 2 examples look like erosion of labor value. On the contrary, it shows that not every activity associated with programming has to be driven by the exchange of money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mftb 5y ago
"Man cannot stand a meaningless life", Carl Jung. I've spent twenty-five years coding, solved some problems, made some money for myself, more for others, but what have I accomplished? It's unlikely it will be through a stackoverflow answer or a post on HN, but I quietly maintain the hope that maybe someday, through Free Software or otherwise sharing my knowledge and code, I might actually accomplish something meaningful. The economic value you're talking about has little meaning for me.
- golemiprague 5y ago
  Interesting the use of "Man", maybe women are less willing to share? It is well known that there are much less female contributors to open source or wikipedia, even in the pre childbearing phase. I think it derives from the traditional roles of men and women, men creates value or hunt or acquire resources in some way and then give it for "free" to their wives and children while the women role is to hog those resources for themselves and children. I wonder if this is ever going to change and how long it will take. In my personal experience I have found women to be far less generous, as if it it hurt them to give something without some benefit derived, but that is just anecdotal, I wonder what other people experiences are.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dave_sid 5y ago
So so true. Imagine a plumber turning up at your house and fitting you a new bathroom as their open source project. But then again, if they charged a extortionate ‘support’ fee for years thereafter for doing nothing then that wouldn’t be as crazy. A bit like Red Hat in that sense.
- eyelovewe 5y ago
  That’s a very strange metaphor. How about giving plans away for a bathroom. Last I heard, integrating your app for you and doing it in house wasn’t part of putting a repo on GitHub
  - dave_sid 5y ago
    Plumbers don’t give their bathroom plans away last time I checked. Neither to architects.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Programming isn't labor. Or, at least, it's only "labor" in the same sense that literature or painting is labor. Does it seem strange to you that writers or painters would want the world to see their work, even for free? It doesn't seem strange to me. Programming is the same.
- machinehermiter 5y ago
  No doubt. You can even go a step further. What about this discussion we are having right now on here about this topic? Why bother just for useless upvotes? No one is even paying me to think about this.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  For glory!
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  > it's only "labor" in the same sense that literature or painting is labor. I can't agree with this. Programming can be like literature. It can also be like writing copy for a bad travel brochure.
- rmah 5y ago
  I know a few painters and writers. None of them give away their paintings or books for free, except to friends and family.
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    It's impossible to be a professional painter or writer without a portfolio. It better be impressive, too.
smegma2 5y ago
Many things are not zero-sum, for example if I help you and you help me we will both be better off than before. Sites like stackoverflow make programmers more productive in aggregate; we would be worse off without them. If you can't understand why someone would decide to offer their help for free then at least try to be thankful.
icoder 5y ago
Well there's many reasons. But in addition, most on Stack Overflow is the boring stuff: getting a certain operation, task, calculation right, often in a particular language, with a particular framework. The actual development, in my opinion, starts after that. Just take my day today: interpreting the client's specs and internally communicating and planning a minor change in the context of a few parallel release paths, discussing a few tweaks to a piece of code with a colleague carefully weighing effort, impact on partially rolled out tests, and future flexibility (making best guesses as to where things are going), and analysing / fixing an issue in a piece of code which design delicately balances simplicity, robustness and performance. Call me naive but I don't see an AI taking over before reaching (or nearing) general AI. Nor do I see how someone that's not a competitor already become one just by having access to Stack Overflow, or even a tenfold of it.
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
There are other frameworks than strict personal net worth maximization.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
The heart of the open source movement had more to do with companies locking down software with operating systems and less about star-trek socialism for code. RMS wasn't just some hippie, he actually stuck to his guns and really "stuck it to the man" in a way that actually revolutionized programming today.
ascotan 5y ago
Going to drop this Dan Pink video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhSOAtAyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhSOAtAyQ Basically what motivates good engineers is a good problem. If we can meet our basic needs we give the rest away for free. Companies/entities have been using/exploiting this for years. The gamification points are lame (I agree) but I believe there is a general desire to contribute to the common good and give back to the community.
robotresearcher 5y ago
> my labor is worthless The opposite is true. Analogy: Volvo invented the three point seatbelt. To maximize the value of the invention, they gave it away free to use.
NorwegianDude 5y ago
A lot of people uses stackoverflow for the gamification. Others just want to give something back to the community. Open source is a great way to market yourself. If I have some really valuable code, then I'll keep it for myself. If I think it would be more useful and gain traction as an open source project then I might publish it and in that way position myself as the top expert on that software. A lof of businesses are actively using, publishing and contributing to open source. Not because they don't want to make money, but because it's the way to make money.
michaelmrose 5y ago
The betterment of the human species is more important by far than maximizing the profits any particular individual can earn. Once a work is created the marginal cost of reproduction is close to zero. Software is valuable. A copy of software is paradoxically worth nothing. It's true that software developers need to eat too but we need to figure out a way to do so without making the world more cumbersome, transactional, and shitty.
- sidlls 5y ago
  Betterment of the species?This is another conceit a certain segment of the SE community has. You aren’t physicists, engineers, biologists or chemists; nor are you artists or philosophers. I’d estimate something like 99% of all software development (especially, perhaps, open source) is either for toys or else actively harmful. “Betterment of the species” indeed.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Most things that most people contribute in life are small in impact. We could stand to give away more things of higher impact too instead of maximizing profit.
    - sidlls 5y ago
      Yes, I understand that point, but it's not really what I was getting at. My point is that most software, even or especially open source, isn't even "small impact" (in a positive sense). It's just toys, learning experiments, or used for active harm, etc. Almost no software written today contributes to any "betterment of the species," no matter how small. If software engineers want to contribute in that way, they should support the research efforts of individuals in the areas I mentioned. Those projects are meaningful and impactful. But they're a tiny fraction of software developed. It's simply an incredibly ignorant conceit to fancy oneself as providing even small impact simply because one writes some software.
  - d110af5ccf 5y ago
    > (especially, perhaps, open source) How do you reason? Are Linux, sqlite, LLVM, or OpenSSL actively harmful? KDE? Blender? Those are obviously not "toys" and each seems genuinely helpful and useful to me.
vonsydov 5y ago
No they’re not a weird bunch. Humans unlike other primates like helping each other without prompting.
b3morales 5y ago
Both Stack Overflow and publishing your code openly are strongly motivated by pride/showing off your know-how. When I participated on Stack Overflow, for me it was a combination of learning a lot by answering other people's questions and getting a kick out of demonstrating my expertise.
mr_toad 5y ago
Information wants to be free.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

The only explanations I can think of are (1) altruism, (2) intent to profit from one's reputation, and (3) simply enjoying puzzle solving. Am I missing any? And are any of them so strange?

staticassertion 5y ago
(2) And (3) aren't strange and are very likely the main drivers. It isn't hard to imagine that humans, and really any intelligent life, have evolved to enjoy problem solving and structure incentives around being good at it.
icoder 5y ago
Do not underestimate how much you can learn from teaching / explaining something (you think you already know) to someone else.
- rapnie 5y ago
  Learning in public [0], discussed on HN before. [0] https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/ https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/
oefnak 5y ago
For me it is contributing to a project that has helped me too. For every useful answer I received on stack overflow I've answered some questions myself.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Interesting. I wonder whether "repaying a debt you feel but are under no legal obligation to repay" should qualify as altruism. (It feels altruistic to me.)

sidlls 5y ago

And then they complain bitterly when commercial entities use it without contributing back, treat workers poorly, and all that. It's not weirdness; it's ignorance and/or stupidity.

jhgb 5y ago

> please have it for free, my labor is worthless. That's weird logic. Presumably you wouldn't create something you consider worthless - you'd create it because you needed it.

eigenhombre 5y ago
Or because the act of creation is pleasurable in and of itself.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

sudosysgen 5y ago

Programmers aren't unique in thagt. If you create the right conditions, driven people will just work for the sake of it, if it can help someone or create something beautiful. It's the reason why us humans are where we are to begin with.

ansible 5y ago
This is what a post-scarcity society is supposed to be. A world where everyone has enough, and they do things (programming, art, whatever) for the joy of it.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Yes, programming producing products that have zero marginal cost gives us a glimpse of what the future may look like - either the open source volunteer future, or the neofeudal artificially locked down future.

imnotlost 5y ago

Philip Glass talks about this exact thing here: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/philip-glass-on-controlling-your-output-and-getting-paid-for-what-you-make/ https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/philip-glass-on-co...

hkt 5y ago
That link is amazing. Maybe my reply is off topic, but Glass is an extraordinary composer and it is always a pleasure to see him referenced saliently like this. Thanks!

meh99 5y ago

Humans were giving away their service to the church for promises of forever life. Mass delusions are easy to propagate as they require little emotional nuance; a salute, tattoo, incantation… those used to be enough to bind large groups. Groups are out though. We’re leaning into enabling humans as atomic agents and automating away the utilitarian social obligations, and work of biological survival to get there.

jasode 5y ago

>Thousands of programmers giving away their professional advice, spending their valuable time…for what exactly? Imaginary internet points? Before Stackoverflow, people were answering questions on USENET newsgroups without any award of points. And before USENET and the internet, hobbyists would gather to trade advice on building home computers. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club The common theme isn't the points... it's that people like to be helpful and share knowledge. >Open source is another one: here’s my code that I’ve worked so hard on, spent countless hours on - please have it for free, my labor is worthless. There are multiple motivations for open source. In my case, I did it because I could get more value from the community's enhancements than the "free code" the community got from me. >It’s like they’re actively seeking to bring their own value down. Neither of your 2 examples look like erosion of labor value. On the contrary, it shows that not every activity associated with programming has to be driven by the exchange of money.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mftb 5y ago

"Man cannot stand a meaningless life", Carl Jung. I've spent twenty-five years coding, solved some problems, made some money for myself, more for others, but what have I accomplished? It's unlikely it will be through a stackoverflow answer or a post on HN, but I quietly maintain the hope that maybe someday, through Free Software or otherwise sharing my knowledge and code, I might actually accomplish something meaningful. The economic value you're talking about has little meaning for me.

golemiprague 5y ago
Interesting the use of "Man", maybe women are less willing to share? It is well known that there are much less female contributors to open source or wikipedia, even in the pre childbearing phase. I think it derives from the traditional roles of men and women, men creates value or hunt or acquire resources in some way and then give it for "free" to their wives and children while the women role is to hog those resources for themselves and children. I wonder if this is ever going to change and how long it will take. In my personal experience I have found women to be far less generous, as if it it hurt them to give something without some benefit derived, but that is just anecdotal, I wonder what other people experiences are.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dave_sid 5y ago

So so true. Imagine a plumber turning up at your house and fitting you a new bathroom as their open source project. But then again, if they charged a extortionate ‘support’ fee for years thereafter for doing nothing then that wouldn’t be as crazy. A bit like Red Hat in that sense.

eyelovewe 5y ago
That’s a very strange metaphor. How about giving plans away for a bathroom. Last I heard, integrating your app for you and doing it in house wasn’t part of putting a repo on GitHub
- dave_sid 5y ago
  Plumbers don’t give their bathroom plans away last time I checked. Neither to architects.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

Programming isn't labor. Or, at least, it's only "labor" in the same sense that literature or painting is labor. Does it seem strange to you that writers or painters would want the world to see their work, even for free? It doesn't seem strange to me. Programming is the same.

machinehermiter 5y ago
No doubt. You can even go a step further. What about this discussion we are having right now on here about this topic? Why bother just for useless upvotes? No one is even paying me to think about this.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
For glory!
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
> it's only "labor" in the same sense that literature or painting is labor. I can't agree with this. Programming can be like literature. It can also be like writing copy for a bad travel brochure.
rmah 5y ago
I know a few painters and writers. None of them give away their paintings or books for free, except to friends and family.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  It's impossible to be a professional painter or writer without a portfolio. It better be impressive, too.

smegma2 5y ago

Many things are not zero-sum, for example if I help you and you help me we will both be better off than before. Sites like stackoverflow make programmers more productive in aggregate; we would be worse off without them. If you can't understand why someone would decide to offer their help for free then at least try to be thankful.

icoder 5y ago

Well there's many reasons. But in addition, most on Stack Overflow is the boring stuff: getting a certain operation, task, calculation right, often in a particular language, with a particular framework. The actual development, in my opinion, starts after that. Just take my day today: interpreting the client's specs and internally communicating and planning a minor change in the context of a few parallel release paths, discussing a few tweaks to a piece of code with a colleague carefully weighing effort, impact on partially rolled out tests, and future flexibility (making best guesses as to where things are going), and analysing / fixing an issue in a piece of code which design delicately balances simplicity, robustness and performance. Call me naive but I don't see an AI taking over before reaching (or nearing) general AI. Nor do I see how someone that's not a competitor already become one just by having access to Stack Overflow, or even a tenfold of it.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

There are other frameworks than strict personal net worth maximization.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

The heart of the open source movement had more to do with companies locking down software with operating systems and less about star-trek socialism for code. RMS wasn't just some hippie, he actually stuck to his guns and really "stuck it to the man" in a way that actually revolutionized programming today.

ascotan 5y ago

Going to drop this Dan Pink video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhSOAtAyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgGhSOAtAyQ Basically what motivates good engineers is a good problem. If we can meet our basic needs we give the rest away for free. Companies/entities have been using/exploiting this for years. The gamification points are lame (I agree) but I believe there is a general desire to contribute to the common good and give back to the community.

robotresearcher 5y ago

> my labor is worthless The opposite is true. Analogy: Volvo invented the three point seatbelt. To maximize the value of the invention, they gave it away free to use.

NorwegianDude 5y ago

A lot of people uses stackoverflow for the gamification. Others just want to give something back to the community. Open source is a great way to market yourself. If I have some really valuable code, then I'll keep it for myself. If I think it would be more useful and gain traction as an open source project then I might publish it and in that way position myself as the top expert on that software. A lof of businesses are actively using, publishing and contributing to open source. Not because they don't want to make money, but because it's the way to make money.

michaelmrose 5y ago

The betterment of the human species is more important by far than maximizing the profits any particular individual can earn. Once a work is created the marginal cost of reproduction is close to zero. Software is valuable. A copy of software is paradoxically worth nothing. It's true that software developers need to eat too but we need to figure out a way to do so without making the world more cumbersome, transactional, and shitty.

sidlls 5y ago
Betterment of the species?This is another conceit a certain segment of the SE community has. You aren’t physicists, engineers, biologists or chemists; nor are you artists or philosophers. I’d estimate something like 99% of all software development (especially, perhaps, open source) is either for toys or else actively harmful. “Betterment of the species” indeed.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Most things that most people contribute in life are small in impact. We could stand to give away more things of higher impact too instead of maximizing profit.
  - sidlls 5y ago
    Yes, I understand that point, but it's not really what I was getting at. My point is that most software, even or especially open source, isn't even "small impact" (in a positive sense). It's just toys, learning experiments, or used for active harm, etc. Almost no software written today contributes to any "betterment of the species," no matter how small. If software engineers want to contribute in that way, they should support the research efforts of individuals in the areas I mentioned. Those projects are meaningful and impactful. But they're a tiny fraction of software developed. It's simply an incredibly ignorant conceit to fancy oneself as providing even small impact simply because one writes some software.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > (especially, perhaps, open source) How do you reason? Are Linux, sqlite, LLVM, or OpenSSL actively harmful? KDE? Blender? Those are obviously not "toys" and each seems genuinely helpful and useful to me.

vonsydov 5y ago

No they’re not a weird bunch. Humans unlike other primates like helping each other without prompting.

b3morales 5y ago

Both Stack Overflow and publishing your code openly are strongly motivated by pride/showing off your know-how. When I participated on Stack Overflow, for me it was a combination of learning a lot by answering other people's questions and getting a kick out of demonstrating my expertise.

mr_toad 5y ago

Information wants to be free.