Quite a few years ago, I was approached by my then-employer who asked me if I programmed in my spare time outside of work, and I said I did. He said, "great, I have this outside software that I sell, and I'd like somebody to work on it outside of work hours, but I don't want to pay you to work on it." He was disappointed to learn that I wasn't as "passionate" as he had hoped.
The dispassionate developer
41–50 of 262 posts
Re: The dispassionate developer
#42Maybe it's the jobs that I've worked, or the country I'm in ( UK ). But I've really not seen this shift towards looking at portfolios of open source work rather than CV's. Every company I've worked for has requested a CV, and often does some form of test or in person interview centred around programming problems. The tests vary in quality and depth. I wouldn't think of myself as a passionate developer. I have a famil…
I can probably give the impression of a passionate developer because I'm self-taught and one of the things I like to do in my free time is write code.
Still clock out at 5, though, and you can be sure I'm not going to put work Slack on my personal phone. My time is my time.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mine is frustrating and not a large paycheck at all. I was just browsing job posting this morning, but it's depressing. There's nothing interesting out there that pays more, and my skill set is not really in demand.
I can usually find interesting stuff, but nothing I’d ever be qualified for. Can’t speak to what most of it pays, but if I had to guess: more than I’m making now, less than I could be making theoretically.
This area is mostly boring business CRUD. I have the qualification problem too. Nobody wants to train, and nobody needs FileNet or Neoxam resources.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…
Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…
We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely incompetent when assigned to a real project.
Maybe we're just really bad at interviews? It probably doesn't help that management here is almost entirely non-technical. There's usually a developer or two sitting in on the interview to try and balance it out, but I don't think any of us would consider ourselves particularly good at interviewing people.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a scale much much larger than others. Facebook isn't just gaining from OSS because they can use other's repos, they are gaining because they can have others fix and build their own repos. The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not contribute. Sure, React is nice and fine for the community, great framework...but the intent is not to help the community in the…
> The point I'm making is that large companies benefit on a scale much much larger than others. They do benefit immensely, but no by having "others fix and build" their own repos. You're overestimating the source code contributions and underestimating the cost to manage a hugely popular project. > The Gameplan is to gain from the community, not contribute. This is just silly. The """gameplan""" is to contribute and A…
I don't necessarily agree with "The Gameplan". Yet the inverse, the idea that the majority of companies in a position to contribute to the communities they utilize, is just as much something I have yet to see. If anything, the overwhelming attitude I see in companies is "this is our secret sauce, and we don't want to let go of it because a competitor might use it and one-up us", while making liberal use of e.g. open source Unix distros and open source libraries. Confidentially clauses.
Even many companies who do eventually release parts of their secret sauce (e.g. Google, Facebook) first secure their financial and tech positions before they do so. In other words, when they do release their secret sauce, the good will they get far outweighs the risk of a competitor improving on top of their secret sauce and getting a significant chunk of their market.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…
Thank you! When I was single I had a lot of free time to tinker and go through coding tests, etc, etc, and cater to whatever hiring shenanigans were in place. First marriage, then a kid, and I find myself grabbing my laptop after work maybe once a fortnight. I'm always "open for new challenges" and I regularly apply to positions in interesting (to me) projects, but more often than not, at some point in their process…
So I am married with kids and I have two separate careers in unrelated industries to balance, only one of which is full time though. Still I find time to spend with the wife and kids and I still contribute daily to open source. It is all about budgeting and balance. What are you willing to sacrifice. I don't have social time outside the family and I don't watch much television unless I am traveling away from the family. I balance open source against things like gardening and house maintenance but gardening and house maintenance only take so much time.
The biggest killers to my open source contributions are general life soul sucking killers. For me the worst is long driving commutes to an office. I can feel my soul bleeding away.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the hiring side, it’s rare to see someone come through with significant OSS contributions. A small bug fix here or there is about the most I see from 90% of resumes. Every once in a while we see someone with a lot of open source contributions, or even full leadership of a popular project. These people would really prefer if we believed that OSS contributions and GitHub profiles replaced resumes or CVs, because it’…
Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…
I prefer to look at everything the candidate has to offer.
Don’t penalize people for not having OSS contributions, of course, but it doesn’t make sense to ignore them. Whatever credentials the candidate brings to the table should be taken into consideration.
Not everyone has the opportunity to go to colleges or get a first job at a well-known company. If someone chooses to prove themselves via OSS contributions, let them.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#48Not seeing why employers are to blame. Developers are the ones that decided their work is worthless.
> their work is worthless
So, I'm old enough to remember a time before widespread open source and even before the world-wide-web itself. I was paid to work on whatever my employer thought they could sell, but not necessarily what I was interested in learning more about. When Linux came out, for example, I thought that going through it and maybe even working on it would be a great way to learn more about operating systems in a way that I would never get a chance to do professionally. Being curious about something isn't necessarily declaring it "worthless".
That said, I agree with the author that it's scummy to demand it of employees (although I've never seen that myself).
Re: The dispassionate developer
#49I'm betting on this article being controversial here somewhat. The point on OSS is hilariously true though. Like, everyone does realize that the tech giants just found a way to make the community work for them and to make money off the backs of it right? OSS is great for almost everyone, don't get me wrong, but in whole, the largest tech companies in the world have gotten an entire community to test, fix, and develop…
Then get paid for the work. I just don't want licenses that pretend to be OSS or Free software when they are not.
Re: The dispassionate developer
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking that a step further, we often actively discourage looking at OSS contributions during resume review for the same reason we don't offer take home interview assignments: it's biased against people who don't have a whole lot of extra time at home. When we have done either of the above, the singles who work part time have a bunch of time to perfect their work suddenly have a lot to show over the single parents who…
We're having a bit of a debate about this internally as the company I work for is struggling to hire good candidates. For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations, but we've had many people in the past who've interviewed very well but turned out to be completely in…
>For a while we've had a take-home test and that has increased our success rate somewhat. But as you say, we really don't want to lay unreasonable expectations on people who may have other obligations
These are mutually exclusive things. Candidates who have more free time to code are more likely to be better at it than those who don't (all else equal). Candidates who have OSS maintenance / leadership experience are more likely to work well in teams (all else equal).
If you choose not to weight those things, to balance the playing field for people who have more obligations outside of work, then you'll also have lesser quality candidates (again, generally).
So if you're struggling to hire good candidates, maybe it's a good idea to weight these things (and bias against people with less free time outside work). Once you have good candidates, and this is no longer a pressure on your business, then it might be a good time to try and balance the playing field for new hires.
But you cannot balance the playing field and also hire the best candidates. The best candidates will have unfair advantages in general. You can either lean towards having the best or lean towards balancing the playing field.