5 ms·

Another one: "This is the first and the most important characteristic of a software developer. Do you contribute to open source projects?" A wonderful new kin

by M8 12y ago

Another one: "This is the first and the most important characteristic of a software developer. Do you contribute to open source projects?" A wonderful new kind of bigotry. "Thus, if your Github account is empty..." ...than your BitBucket might be not.

dalke 12y ago
Agreed. Apparently if you aren't part of the in-crowd then you are a no-one. And if it isn't on the web then doesn't exist. Some other things that made me go "wha-?" were: "StackOverflow is not just an indicator of how smart you are and how many upvotes you got for the "best programming joke"" - StackOverflow is a lousy judge at how smart one is. Alan Kay is on SO, with a reputation of 3,000. Mine is over twice that. Alex Martelli is over 300x that. How is this a measure of "smartness"? (Oh, and most of my comments on S.O. were from an era when it was okay to ask about programming jokes, or the most significant inventions in CS since 1980.) "I often hear something like "my company doesn't pay me for open source contribution and at home I want to spend time with my family". ... By paying your salary your employer does already invest in open source products, because you're an active user of them. The problem is that you are not interested in becoming more active in that contribution. I see this as a lack of passion and self-motivation. Will you be an effective developer in our projects? Not at all, because our entire management model relies on self-motivation." I am also a user of patented products, and a user of public domain products, and a user of Apple products. There's no explanation of why open source is special; why is it okay to not be passionate about developing new patents, or developing new software for Apple? I am also self-employed for 15 years. That should surely be better evidence of self-motivation than contributions to an open source project or SO. And finally, I actually do develop open source products. It costs about $30,000 to acquire a copy of my MIT-licensed code. The only way the above makes sense is to assume that open source software shouldn't cost anything.

by M8 12y ago

dalke 12y ago

Agreed. Apparently if you aren't part of the in-crowd then you are a no-one. And if it isn't on the web then doesn't exist. Some other things that made me go "wha-?" were: "StackOverflow is not just an indicator of how smart you are and how many upvotes you got for the "best programming joke"" - StackOverflow is a lousy judge at how smart one is. Alan Kay is on SO, with a reputation of 3,000. Mine is over twice that. Alex Martelli is over 300x that. How is this a measure of "smartness"? (Oh, and most of my comments on S.O. were from an era when it was okay to ask about programming jokes, or the most significant inventions in CS since 1980.) "I often hear something like "my company doesn't pay me for open source contribution and at home I want to spend time with my family". ... By paying your salary your employer does already invest in open source products, because you're an active user of them. The problem is that you are not interested in becoming more active in that contribution. I see this as a lack of passion and self-motivation. Will you be an effective developer in our projects? Not at all, because our entire management model relies on self-motivation." I am also a user of patented products, and a user of public domain products, and a user of Apple products. There's no explanation of why open source is special; why is it okay to not be passionate about developing new patents, or developing new software for Apple? I am also self-employed for 15 years. That should surely be better evidence of self-motivation than contributions to an open source project or SO. And finally, I actually do develop open source products. It costs about $30,000 to acquire a copy of my MIT-licensed code. The only way the above makes sense is to assume that open source software shouldn't cost anything.