Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

Exactly my thoughts.

Heck, a buddy showed me a form letter the IRS sent him when he was first starting out and didn't make a whole lot of money (< $500 living at home). He had filed taxes and the IRS had sent him a letter telling him he really didn't need to file and please don't do it again until he had a higher income. He is doing much better now and keeps the letter as inspiration.

I'm envisioning a UPS. Good question.

Thanks for sharing!

It sounds like your questions are calibrated to detect if the interviewee is passionate. I totally get that, 15 years ago, it was obvious everyone around was, but those last years I find myself wondering more and more if devs around me didn't get into coding just because "it's a good job", and it looked slightly more interesting than a career in law or commerce.

> I have one big issue with recruitment process: when I meet people, after those 2 questions, I can know very quickly that I don't want to hire with them. If we are in the first 5 minutes of the interview, how can I tell them "no" without being too rude?

Been there, I feel the pain :) I had briefly a job as a manager, and I knew it was not for me when I started to panic about how to tell people I won't hire them. Still better than to have to fire them, but damn, finding a proper way to say "you're not good enough" or any other reason is brutal.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time for sharing all of that with us.

> What are some tips to get into open source and turn it into fulltime career[?]

Don't.

If you want money get a job.

If you can't help but write software, if coding is what you do, all day, every day, because everything else is fucking dull, if you, like Asimov, take your typewriter on vacation, then, one day, your skill and art will be superlative. On that day, give the world your software.

I roll out of bed and within twenty minutes I'm on the machine. I won't stop until my eyes cross (my body's way of telling me we're done for the day) at around midnight to 2AM. I burned up my stomach eating nothing but coffee and blueberry muffins from dawn to afternoon, I blew out my back from not sitting on good chairs (Aeron chair FTW three years and my back works again!) I've been doing this for over a quarter of century and I'm still not good enough to publish my software.

(I do anyway but not because it's good enough yet. It's not.)

Computers aren't about making a buck (increasing a mere scalar value) they are an investigation into the nature and meaning of truth. A tool for thought.

Bucky Fuller pointed out that, when you have computers, you can just program them with the available data and they can tell you exactly how to build a working civilization. ("World Game" is the search term there IIRC.) We could solve most of our problems on a spreadsheet if we could just get out act together. We've got all the technology we need already.

(The trick is that we have to optimize globally, e.g. things like connecting all the world's electric grids into one so that we can shift power around as the planet rotates. A global grid has greater opportunities for efficiency.)

So, from that POV, trying to make a living from somehow selling software is counter-productive. Very good programmers have already created all the FOSS we need. Work to alter the nature of the economic system itself.

- - - -

To answer your question, I was homeless when I learned most of my knowledge, I wrote a cool demo and presented it at CodeCon and was offered a job on the spot. Since then I've worked for many startups and once as a TVC at Google, but I have never made a penny from open source. No, wait, that's wrong: I once made $50 selling copies of an RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) app I wrote (in Delphi!) at a college (I sold it at a college, I wasn't attending.) I hope the two people that bought it got some use out of it. But that's it I think.