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Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

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Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#1

Post by sad-throwaway »

I've been working as a programmer for about 7 years now.

Increasingly it feels like my job has just become gluing together opensource components, which doesn't feel creative at all -- there's little problem-solving going on.

All the areas where I could feel like I'm contributing something aren't valued. For instance, shareholders don't care less if the software is reliable, performant, or secure because they only want something that "works." If it "works," everything else is irrelevant.

It wasn't like this when I first started. Back then it felt like open-source was mostly limited to template engines, URL routers, and so on -- stuff you wouldn't want to write yourself and probably couldn't do better. I'm working on a (non-JavaScript) project with almost 200 dependencies. I've had entire weeks at work where all I do is edit YAML files (I don't work in DevOps, it's not k8s) and write glue for code that I'm not allowed to write myself.

Any code I do write myself eventually gets replaced with another open-source package. Even if the package is worse! When I've tried to talk to my manager, he's told me we have to think about how maintainable the project is. It seems the company is trying to optimize for having as much code as possible be maintained by "the community" so they can minimize risk.

It's all left me feeling extremely depressed and I don't know what to do. I'd just leave and work somewhere else, but it seems like this is becoming more and more common. After all, most problems are solved by now. Why not just pull yet another package off GitHub?

Re: Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#4

Post by sad-throwaway »

wizwit999 wrote: post #2

Isn't it awesome to not have to write undifferentiated code? Leaves more time to work on other problems.

Do you mean business logic? Because large parts of that are also farmed out to opensource packages. If someone has implemented it on GitHub, my manager will find it, pull it in, and hack it until it does what is needed.

What can't be done this way is dictated by my manager. I have to implement it as specified in JIRA. There's very little room for creativity.

Re: Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#5

Post by keikobadthebad »

> What can't be done this way is dictated by my manager. I have to implement it as specified in JIRA. There's very little room for creativity.

This isn't really an open source thing... if you replace it with $TEAM_IN_CHEAP_REGION it's nothing new.

Psychopathic managers just see FOSS as the new team in India, team in China except it costs $0.

One way might be to negotiate some time to contribute to the projects to get features mentioned in the Jira. Then you could code again, get public recogonition and help others.

Re: Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#6

Post by gus_massa »

Anecdote time:

Once upon a time, I wrote a program to handle email in VB6, it used POP2, SMTP and some crappy logic to decide what to reply. It was a long time ago, when you could still send messages from mickey@disney.com to your friends without worrying about DKIM, juts plain text.

Now I had to make something similar, but the level of security and signatures is insane. Lucky I just glued a few standard libraries in Racket and call it a day. Writing it was much much faster than the old project and I didn't have to study again the difference of HELO and EHLO.

Back to your problem:

Enjoy the new tools. One interesting part of programing is figuring out which libraries to glue to get high level result that is useful. Magician call it "effects" and "method".

Try to get permission to contribute to some of the projects you are using. Explain that it's better that it's merged mainstream instead of keeping a local fork. Choose the one that are interesting to you. Start with small features because you never know if it is not in the vision of the maintainer or if the maintainer is a moron.

Re: Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#8

Post by markus_zhang »

I think I kinda agree to certain degree. Would be nice if there is a paying job saying hey here is something figure out how to get an OS running on top of it, how to run C or something else on it, how to move some toolchain, etc. And it's one man's job, not a tiny bit in a huge say compiler team.

But this is not realistic. The best time of programming (80-90) as long gone. Who is the architect engineer for UE5? No one, it has to be a huge team.

Re: Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#9

Post by gundmc »

sad-throwaway wrote: post #4
wizwit999 wrote: post #2

Isn't it awesome to not have to write undifferentiated code? Leaves more time to work on other problems.

Do you mean business logic? Because large parts of that are also farmed out to opensource packages. If someone has implemented it on GitHub, my manager will find it, pull it in, and hack it until it does what is needed. What can't be done this way is dictated by my manager. I have to implement it as specified in JIRA. There's very little room for creativity.

That just sounds like a bad manager.

Re: Ask HN: Is open source ruining your job satisfaction too?

#10

Post by speedgoose »

My job is to solve problems, programming is just one tool in my toolbox.

I love to write code but most of the projects can be solved by assembling a few components with some YAML glue and little code. And I use an AI, Github Copilot, to help me doing that.

OpenSource is great for me. The alternative is the enterprise proprietary software with often a "contact us" price tag, which is hell. It takes a while, requires multiple calls to just get a quote, you need to sign legals documents, and then you can see that it's shit. Also, sometimes the price is stupidly too high. With OpenSource you can pull your software containers and start playing immediately.

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