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Yup. If you want to do interesting work / really write software then you have to give it away for free. If you want to get paid you have to spend your days cobb

Yup. If you want to do interesting work / really write software then you have to give it away for free. If you want to get paid you have to spend your days cobbling together open source to accomplish totally trivial functionality that some dimwit has “invented”. That’s the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, unfortunately.

aew4ytasghe5 4y ago
You seem to confuse "a job" with research. How privileged are you when you are complaining about not being able to have fun 100% of paid time, like no generation before us ever had.
- bjornsing 4y ago
  Sure. If you’re looking for “a job” then this situation is great (and there’s nothing wrong with that BTW). But for those of us who like to read Donald Knuth it’s been the road to serfdom.
zarzavat 4y ago
You have to deliver value to your customers/users. If doing hard engineering delivers value then you will get paid for it. If plumbing together open source components delivers value then you will get paid for that. Users don’t care how your product works, they just care that it improves their life.
- bjornsing 4y ago
  Sure. But do you see a lot of lawyers uploading their agreement templates on github? Value (or actually price) is a function of supply and demand, and when there’s almost infinite supply at a zero price point value/price goes to zero. That’s what has happened.
  - 0x445442 4y ago
    Yep, the geeks were duped. It reminds me of a documentary from about 20 years ago where Eric Raymond is boasting to some Microsoft Exec that open source was their worst nightmare. Yeah open source sure showed them, by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      > by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free. They learned how to play the game. Absolutely no other trade out there makes their work available for free to the extent software engineers do. Essentially software engineers put themselves in a position where they _depend_ on salaried employment, working for those that leverage their free work to generate billions in revenue. Sure there are contractors out there but by and large software engineering is salaried work. The naive thinking is that by making software available for free somehow they change the world for the better. Instead they willingly provide free work to corporations that then abuse them.

aew4ytasghe5 4y ago

You seem to confuse "a job" with research. How privileged are you when you are complaining about not being able to have fun 100% of paid time, like no generation before us ever had.

bjornsing 4y ago
Sure. If you’re looking for “a job” then this situation is great (and there’s nothing wrong with that BTW). But for those of us who like to read Donald Knuth it’s been the road to serfdom.

zarzavat 4y ago

You have to deliver value to your customers/users. If doing hard engineering delivers value then you will get paid for it. If plumbing together open source components delivers value then you will get paid for that. Users don’t care how your product works, they just care that it improves their life.

bjornsing 4y ago
Sure. But do you see a lot of lawyers uploading their agreement templates on github? Value (or actually price) is a function of supply and demand, and when there’s almost infinite supply at a zero price point value/price goes to zero. That’s what has happened.
- 0x445442 4y ago
  Yep, the geeks were duped. It reminds me of a documentary from about 20 years ago where Eric Raymond is boasting to some Microsoft Exec that open source was their worst nightmare. Yeah open source sure showed them, by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    > by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free. They learned how to play the game. Absolutely no other trade out there makes their work available for free to the extent software engineers do. Essentially software engineers put themselves in a position where they _depend_ on salaried employment, working for those that leverage their free work to generate billions in revenue. Sure there are contractors out there but by and large software engineering is salaried work. The naive thinking is that by making software available for free somehow they change the world for the better. Instead they willingly provide free work to corporations that then abuse them.