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The reason I stopped being the maintainer on a popular jQuery library was the wave after wave of incompetent folks asking me to do their work for them. I don't

by 67726e 12y ago

The reason I stopped being the maintainer on a popular jQuery library was the wave after wave of incompetent folks asking me to do their work for them. I don't mean mere API questions, or asking things around how the plugin works or does what it does. These were entire "Integrate this for me" questions. People unwilling to do the bare minimum of work. No matter how many examples or how much documentation, these folks flat out wouldn't do their own work. Beyond that, most of these weren't being asked by some 12-year old learning to code, these people would link to their commercial site and expect me to "Give them teh codez" In retrospect, I should have taken the hard-line approach and directed everyone to StackOverflow and limit GitHub to an issue tracker. When it came to assholes making asshole comments and requests, I had no problem telling them to stick their overbearing request where the sun doesn't shine. Of course those folks were few and far in between.

tomjen3 12y ago
If you ever want to go back in OSS development, include a disclaimer that you are more than willing to integrate it into their site, at your usual rate of $X00 dollars per hour, with a minimum of $Y hours. The worst that might happen is that somebody takes you up on that.
- snorkel 12y ago
  Agree. The way to answer"do my work for me" is "Thank you for inquiring about Commercial Support offerings ...."
- izacus 12y ago
  That does not really help - people he's talking about simply do not read and do not care about what you did. Going through bunch of soul-sucking emails/messages/issues every day, even if you do not answer, is a huge demotivator for any public development work :/
  - e40 12y ago
    Why can they simply be ignored? I run a support department (for a closed source product) and we do this all the time.
  - csixty4 12y ago
    That's the big thing for me. It's not the lack of a witty response or a canned reply. It's knowing you did something for free, out of love, and there's an endless stream out people going "more! more!" and getting angry when you won't accommodate their edge case. I had my phone number on one of my personal sites so friends could get in touch with me. Took it down after a week because people would call me in the middle of the day for plugin support, even though there's a forum for support. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it just wears you down. Makes you afraid to check email or answer the phone. Edit: Without getting too deep into personal territory, I'm coming to terms with the fact certain aspects of my childhood trained me to always put other people's needs above my own. Saying "no" has a psychological cost for me because I reflexively beat myself up for being a selfish person.
  - mercer 12y ago
    Could it be a good idea to create a service where people can help with FOSS projects by being the 'intercept' between messages and the maintainers? I feel to inexperienced to help out with actual coding, but helping out with support emails or tickets (and only forwarding those that seem useful) is something I could see myself doing, for example. And I could imagine that after helping out in this way for a while, I'd feel more inclined or more self-confident to start helping out with code. Or does this already exist?
    - Xylakant 12y ago
      I don't think that such a service exists, but you can still do some of that. Pick any open source project you like, hang out on their tracker and IRC channel and answer questions. You might not have the permissions required to actually close issues, but you can certainly do some grunt work: Try to reproduce an issue, give concise description in a comment, create a PR with a test case etc. IRC channels are a good place to start if you know a little about the usage, but not much about the actual code: Answer beginner level questions first. For any moderately complex project there's always tons of these. And when you feel confident, move forward to more complicated ones. It's a great way to learn.
- wahnfrieden 12y ago
  I'm in the same situation with a popular jQuery library. I did manage to get one integration to pay me about twice my normal hourly rate because it's just a few hours of work. Most requests don't respond once I offer to do it for money though, so I'll probably need to advertise it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nailer 12y ago
I wrote the Python library that handles Microsoft Word files. My entire inbox was filled with people from Bangalore and Hyderabad asking me to do whatever work was outsourced to them. The library came with an example of creating, modifying and saving documents that answered nearly all of the questions, and a README that pointed people to it, along with other resources people could use. I've since passed the library to someone else who has a lot more patience than I.
- ClashTheBunny 12y ago
  Isn't it kinda racist to say "people from Bangalore and Hyderabad"? As I'm sure many people from Hyderabad and Bangalore are very competent people who are willing to pay for support. How would you feel if people replaced Bangalore and Hyderabad with London and Liverpool? Even if there are people like what you describe that live there?
  - nkuttler 12y ago
    The truth is never racist, it's just a fact. I'm not saying parent's description is accurate, but distorting facts to conform to somebody's desire for political correctness is on a similar level of despicableness as racism itself, imo.
    - ClashTheBunny 12y ago
      But the parent lacks facts, therefore it is not proven true. Just leave out this one sentence: "My entire inbox was filled with people from Bangalore and Hyderabad asking me to do whatever work was outsourced to them." Do you seriously think that they had 15GB of email? It's a pretty small email provider that doesn't support much space and filters. I think "entire" and "filled" are most likely examples of exaggeration, not facts. Was it really "Bangalore and Hyderabad"? They had it in the signature of the email? They did a statistical analysis on where they came from? None were from Eastern Europe, Japan, the US, England, or college students? Most English native speakers I know have horrible written communication skills. This is also most likely exaggeration, not facts. Even if you traced the IPs of the messages you would still not be able to claim location, we all know how IPs do not correspond 1:1 to physical people. He knows that they were doing it because they were outsourced to? They stated that in their questions? I would love to see some evidence of this. Even if they did "fill" his inbox, with messages truthfully stating they were from Hyderabad and Bangalore, they also told him that it was work that was outsourced to them? I doubt that is even exaggeration for effect. I would like to see this 15GB archive of email showing that proves this is true. Either that, or it seems to be a gross generalization targeted at a specific race or group of people. Which isn't just racist to people who have fallen victim to over sensitivity in service of political correctness.
benihana 12y ago
Sounds frustrating. I'm in a patient mood this morning and I feel like testing my patience; do you have any links to these discussions?
- minikomi 12y ago
  Not OP, but the form builder I created gets its share of "issues" such as [1], but more-so attracts a ton of mail of the same kind.. [1] https://github.com/minikomi/Bootstrap-Form-Builder/issues/105 https://github.com/minikomi/Bootstrap-Form-Builder/issues/10...
  - chrisseaton 12y ago
    Well at least that guy is humble, polite and willing to pay. On the other hand, you've closed the issue without telling him why, so he doesn't even know how to correct his behaviour next time.
    - minikomi 12y ago
      He also sent me an email which I replied to.
omouse 12y ago
This is kinda why I dislike Github and JavaScript. There isn't enough friction to force people to stop and think before they ask stupid questions. Previously, things like that were limited to random forums, IRC or mailing lists, "I'm trying to do X, can you do X for me?". Now that lack of culture has infected popular projects that are on Github. It's strange though that this doesn't seem like a huge issue for projects that have their own issue trackers and wikis...

by 67726e 12y ago

tomjen3 12y ago

If you ever want to go back in OSS development, include a disclaimer that you are more than willing to integrate it into their site, at your usual rate of $X00 dollars per hour, with a minimum of $Y hours. The worst that might happen is that somebody takes you up on that.

snorkel 12y ago
Agree. The way to answer"do my work for me" is "Thank you for inquiring about Commercial Support offerings ...."
izacus 12y ago
That does not really help - people he's talking about simply do not read and do not care about what you did. Going through bunch of soul-sucking emails/messages/issues every day, even if you do not answer, is a huge demotivator for any public development work :/
- e40 12y ago
  Why can they simply be ignored? I run a support department (for a closed source product) and we do this all the time.
- csixty4 12y ago
  That's the big thing for me. It's not the lack of a witty response or a canned reply. It's knowing you did something for free, out of love, and there's an endless stream out people going "more! more!" and getting angry when you won't accommodate their edge case. I had my phone number on one of my personal sites so friends could get in touch with me. Took it down after a week because people would call me in the middle of the day for plugin support, even though there's a forum for support. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it just wears you down. Makes you afraid to check email or answer the phone. Edit: Without getting too deep into personal territory, I'm coming to terms with the fact certain aspects of my childhood trained me to always put other people's needs above my own. Saying "no" has a psychological cost for me because I reflexively beat myself up for being a selfish person.
- mercer 12y ago
  Could it be a good idea to create a service where people can help with FOSS projects by being the 'intercept' between messages and the maintainers? I feel to inexperienced to help out with actual coding, but helping out with support emails or tickets (and only forwarding those that seem useful) is something I could see myself doing, for example. And I could imagine that after helping out in this way for a while, I'd feel more inclined or more self-confident to start helping out with code. Or does this already exist?
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    I don't think that such a service exists, but you can still do some of that. Pick any open source project you like, hang out on their tracker and IRC channel and answer questions. You might not have the permissions required to actually close issues, but you can certainly do some grunt work: Try to reproduce an issue, give concise description in a comment, create a PR with a test case etc. IRC channels are a good place to start if you know a little about the usage, but not much about the actual code: Answer beginner level questions first. For any moderately complex project there's always tons of these. And when you feel confident, move forward to more complicated ones. It's a great way to learn.
wahnfrieden 12y ago
I'm in the same situation with a popular jQuery library. I did manage to get one integration to pay me about twice my normal hourly rate because it's just a few hours of work. Most requests don't respond once I offer to do it for money though, so I'll probably need to advertise it.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nailer 12y ago

I wrote the Python library that handles Microsoft Word files. My entire inbox was filled with people from Bangalore and Hyderabad asking me to do whatever work was outsourced to them. The library came with an example of creating, modifying and saving documents that answered nearly all of the questions, and a README that pointed people to it, along with other resources people could use. I've since passed the library to someone else who has a lot more patience than I.

ClashTheBunny 12y ago
Isn't it kinda racist to say "people from Bangalore and Hyderabad"? As I'm sure many people from Hyderabad and Bangalore are very competent people who are willing to pay for support. How would you feel if people replaced Bangalore and Hyderabad with London and Liverpool? Even if there are people like what you describe that live there?
- nkuttler 12y ago
  The truth is never racist, it's just a fact. I'm not saying parent's description is accurate, but distorting facts to conform to somebody's desire for political correctness is on a similar level of despicableness as racism itself, imo.
  - ClashTheBunny 12y ago
    But the parent lacks facts, therefore it is not proven true. Just leave out this one sentence: "My entire inbox was filled with people from Bangalore and Hyderabad asking me to do whatever work was outsourced to them." Do you seriously think that they had 15GB of email? It's a pretty small email provider that doesn't support much space and filters. I think "entire" and "filled" are most likely examples of exaggeration, not facts. Was it really "Bangalore and Hyderabad"? They had it in the signature of the email? They did a statistical analysis on where they came from? None were from Eastern Europe, Japan, the US, England, or college students? Most English native speakers I know have horrible written communication skills. This is also most likely exaggeration, not facts. Even if you traced the IPs of the messages you would still not be able to claim location, we all know how IPs do not correspond 1:1 to physical people. He knows that they were doing it because they were outsourced to? They stated that in their questions? I would love to see some evidence of this. Even if they did "fill" his inbox, with messages truthfully stating they were from Hyderabad and Bangalore, they also told him that it was work that was outsourced to them? I doubt that is even exaggeration for effect. I would like to see this 15GB archive of email showing that proves this is true. Either that, or it seems to be a gross generalization targeted at a specific race or group of people. Which isn't just racist to people who have fallen victim to over sensitivity in service of political correctness.

benihana 12y ago

Sounds frustrating. I'm in a patient mood this morning and I feel like testing my patience; do you have any links to these discussions?

minikomi 12y ago
Not OP, but the form builder I created gets its share of "issues" such as [1], but more-so attracts a ton of mail of the same kind.. [1] https://github.com/minikomi/Bootstrap-Form-Builder/issues/105 https://github.com/minikomi/Bootstrap-Form-Builder/issues/10...
- chrisseaton 12y ago
  Well at least that guy is humble, polite and willing to pay. On the other hand, you've closed the issue without telling him why, so he doesn't even know how to correct his behaviour next time.
  - minikomi 12y ago
    He also sent me an email which I replied to.

omouse 12y ago

This is kinda why I dislike Github and JavaScript. There isn't enough friction to force people to stop and think before they ask stupid questions. Previously, things like that were limited to random forums, IRC or mailing lists, "I'm trying to do X, can you do X for me?". Now that lack of culture has infected popular projects that are on Github. It's strange though that this doesn't seem like a huge issue for projects that have their own issue trackers and wikis...