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Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

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Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#111

Post by sethammons »

hajderr wrote: post #10

What is a good engineer? Seriously, what makes a good engineer? Good at coding? Helps out his colleagues? Arrogant?

Off the top of my head, a good software engineer is not just a coder. They develop solutions to problems that provide value. They do so under constraints of time and resources. Beyond that, you then can get a feeling of the level of the engineer depending on the following:

- code: maintainability, instrumentation, extensibility, readability, testability, performance, handles tradeoffs in complexity, and the time to create the code.

- projects: can work independently or in a team, can work with individuals across teams and disciplines, can influence project direction, can architect solutions and choose designs and supporting tooling based on tradeoffs, can deliver on a reasonable time scale.

- people: can mentor and be menteed, can collaborate well, can lead or follow, and can inspire best practices.

I'm sure there is much more, but that is off the top of my head shortly after waking up.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#112

Post by bluGill »

sudhirj wrote: post #110
wenc wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chris Lattner tried to open source for the sake of OSS, with LLVM and Swift, but he left. Maybe there's some history here that I'm missing: but it looks like LLVM and Swift are open source. Did Chris have any trouble open-sourcing them? Was the reason for his departure related to that?

He succeeded at open sourcing those two projects. Not sure why he left, but other than WebKit, which was probably a defense against Microsoft and IE, don’t think anything else can come out of Apple.

WebKit started as a fork from khtml (from kde). Apple didn't have a choice about open sourcing Webkit because they started with GPL2 code. They would have kept it closed source if they could, but that would have taken a few years of development, while they could start with khtml and get a great browser in just a few months.

I expect in a few years (5-10) Apple will do an audit, discover that only a small amount of code isn't written by Apple, and replace that with inhouse code and then relicense to something propitiatory. Time will tell.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#113

Post by FakeComments »

maxxxxx wrote: post #95
fergie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google actually does open source a significant part of their reusable libraries. I'm thinking about stuff like Leveldb, Tensorflow and Angular off the top of my head, but I'm sure there is a lot more. Some companies do seem to be ideologically opposed to open source (I'm looking at you Balmer-era Microsoft) but Google has always seemed to have had a certain commitment to it.

I think a Javascript frontend framework like Angular has to be open source by definition. Or is there a way to close source it?

It has to be open source in the sense of sharing the source code, but companies take the extra step of making it open source in the sense you have a license to use it for your own website.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#114

Post by 013a »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #15
013a wrote: post #6

There is a line you can draw in the sand here. I usually define it in terms of the Product; I don't believe companies should feel compelled, or even desire to, open source code which directly relates to the product they're trying to sell. The number of companies which actually do this are few and far between (Red Hat, Gitlab, others of course). However, companies should desire to open source code which supports their…

> I guarantee you'll get really high quality READMEs, you'll get documentation, clean APIs... I think this is hyperbole. Go look at, say, Atlassian's open source code: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlassian-maven-enforcer-rul... Or https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/confluence-react-components Or https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/confluence-threaddump-plugin The thing about "guarantees" is they only take a single count…

Oh absolutely it was hyperbole. I should have said "higher quality"; I'm scared to think about how well-documented and written Atlassians non-open-source stuff is if that's the quality of their open source stuff. I'd bet money that a good bit of it is worse, much worse.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#115

Post by scirocco »

fipple wrote: post #42

On the contrary, I’ve found that companies who are actually doing hardcore software engineering, where the code is the main value driver for the business, rarely open source their best stuff, but they’re great places for engineers. Google doesn’t open source its self driving car code. Facebook’s value driver is the network, not the code, so it can open source anything. Dropbox’s client is amazing and is not only clos…

You forgot support as main driver

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#116

Post by scirocco »

onion2k wrote: post #19
mariusmg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've known some brilliant engineers who don't care at all for open source code The obvious irony here is those "brilliant" engineers will use open source code even though they don't care for it.

If you go through your dev career thinking only people who write and use open source code are brilliant you'll miss out on the opportunity to learn from some of the industry's best developers. There are loads of people working on entirely closed source projects who are very, very good engineers. Not every project is web.

Yeah, just like Sharepoint developers

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#117

Post by austincheney »

watwut wrote: post #107
austincheney wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open sourcing the code is important to me because its frustrating being a senior hired onto a team of all newbs. By senior I mean a person who can write code quickly. By newbs I mean people with high insecurity that just want to dick around with code style and framework tooling.

How does open source changes anything in that situation? You think that open source people would care less about code style and framework tooling?

Because you can see the damage before committing to a salary.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#118

Post by austincheney »

sethammons wrote: post #98
austincheney wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open sourcing the code is important to me because its frustrating being a senior hired onto a team of all newbs. By senior I mean a person who can write code quickly. By newbs I mean people with high insecurity that just want to dick around with code style and framework tooling.

I would not define "senior" as "one who codes quickly." I also would not define a software developer's level as "newb." So there is that. Junior, mid-level, senior, and then maybe principal. I would gauge them by a combination of time in the market, ability to write production grade code, the ability to make informed tradeoffs, ability to work independently and as a team player, and ability to work across teams and d…

> I would gauge them by a combination of time in the market,

Absolutely not. Time on the market isn't an immediate indication of competence. It certainly isn't an indicator of potential. In my experience you are so much better making an objective hiring choice by throwing EVERYTHING related to programming and interviews away and simply providing a battery of personality tests. I went through this when I was interviewing with Bridgewater.

Performance is better determined by the briefness of product, the speed of execution, and minimal time of delivery. An educated person can make gross determinations of this by examination and testing of the code. Likewise, lesser souls can evaluate the product for code style, a super high dependency count, and favorite framework.

Ultimately it comes down looking for an ambitious endeavor versus looking for emotional comfort.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#119

Post by arendtio »

fro0116 wrote: post #92
arendtio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, the Dropbox client? I mean, I never used it but I can hardly imagine anything that makes it so special. I use Nextcloud and from what I can tell, there is nothing that sets the Dropbox client apart from the Nextcloud sync client (which is 100% open source). In addition, some parts of the Dropbox sync client are open source too: https://www.dropbox.com/de/help/desktop-web/linux-commands#b... Sure if your bu…

For one, delta-sync was built into the Dropbox client from the very beginning, and I'm getting the impression from this thread that Nextcloud still doesn't have it till this day: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/417 This is a major contributor to sync UX, and by no means trivial to implement. Another example is their file stubs implementation (Project Infinite) that works across platforms, which is also no…

> This really seems like a matter of the OP not knowing what they're missing and then flaunting that ignorance.

In fact, I added that I never used Dropbox to give context on my perspective. I am not sure that qualifies as 'flaunting that ignorance'.

Regarding the delta-sync feature: That is, in fact, a feature neither Nextcloud nor Owncloud posses at the moment. On the other hand, it would not be that beneficial to my use-cases since I rarely have large files within my synced folders and most of the time I have a GBit connection to my Nextcloud. So I guess I am missing not that much (at least with my current usage pattern).

Granted, for some use-cases, it is essential and bringing such a feature to all major platforms is not a trivial task. Yet I still wonder if protecting the implementation is necessary since the comments in the Nextcloud issue suggest that the primary problem the availability of the developer is (who might have an easier job if he could take a look at the Dropbox code, but ultimately he would have to write an implementation that integrates with his project).

And ultimately I wonder what makes people decide which service they want to use. For many people, it sure is the little friction you encounter during the setup of Dropbox. For me, it is not that much about the features of the client software but about the features of the larger system. Being able to host my own server is essential to me. Having an open source implementation is a nice add-on, which I value and made use of already. AFAIK those features are not available with Dropbox I seriously doubt my previous comment qualifies as flaunting ignorance.

Re: Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

#120

Post by pjmlp »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #90
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I challenge the notion that product is so precious that there's a benefit to it remaining closed source. If there is a line, I'd draw it at business process, not product. The overwhelming commercial success of FOSS desktop software.

Huh? Most FOSS desktop software is not commercial to begin with, however there are companies like JetBrains that do sell quite successfully to Linux users, even as their core product is FLOSS.

Exactly, because everyone failed to monetize it.

JetBrains sells developer tools, a very niche market, specially when a large majority of FOSS is allergic to paying for tooling.

In fact I would bet a large percentage of those Linux users are using Android Studio or Community variants.

It would be very interesting to know how many of those users has JetBrains actually managed to monetize on.

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