Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Want to Recruit Better Engineers? Open Source Your Code

angel.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–146 of 146 posts

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

#141

Post by sudhirj »

nouseforaname wrote: post #137
sudhirj wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think the MBA speak for this is “commoditising you competition”. It’s when you use open source or zero pricing to either offensively or defensively to nullify an advantage your competitor has. Google attacks Apple by offering an open source OS (Android). Now everyone can make a phone. They defend against Facebook controlling the internet by offering an open source browser (Chrome/ium). Microsoft defends against irrel…

> They defend against Facebook controlling the internet by offering an open source browser (Chrome/ium). Imo chrome and android are about being able to ensure ads are delivered.

At this point, the ability to deliver ads is the definition of internet control.

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

#142

Post by dragandj »

sudhirj wrote: post #100
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…

Think the MBA speak for this is “commoditising you competition”. It’s when you use open source or zero pricing to either offensively or defensively to nullify an advantage your competitor has. Google attacks Apple by offering an open source OS (Android). Now everyone can make a phone. They defend against Facebook controlling the internet by offering an open source browser (Chrome/ium). Microsoft defends against irrel…

Amazon "open sourced" OpenJDK, which has been open source since the day 0 of Oracle purchasing Sun? Oracle just committed to maintaining backports for OpenJDK 8, and that part of Oracle's business it might be commoditizing: paid support for legacy versions, not the code.

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

#143

Post by sudhirj »

dragandj wrote: post #142
sudhirj wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think the MBA speak for this is “commoditising you competition”. It’s when you use open source or zero pricing to either offensively or defensively to nullify an advantage your competitor has. Google attacks Apple by offering an open source OS (Android). Now everyone can make a phone. They defend against Facebook controlling the internet by offering an open source browser (Chrome/ium). Microsoft defends against irrel…

Amazon "open sourced" OpenJDK, which has been open source since the day 0 of Oracle purchasing Sun? Oracle just committed to maintaining backports for OpenJDK 8, and that part of Oracle's business it might be commoditizing: paid support for legacy versions, not the code.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-corretto-no-c...

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

#144

Post by narwally »

KaiserPro wrote: post #58

"personal engineering brands" You do not want to hire engineers with "personal brands", in the same way that hiring celebrities for anything other than showbiz, normally causes problems. At a previous large company with massive opensource scheme, "personal brand" engineers blocked many attempts to increase security, specifically filtering git commits for keys, PII and other expensive mistakes. the "personal brand eng…

> engineers blocked many attempts to increase security, specifically filtering git commits for keys, PII and other expensive mistakes.

I am struggling really hard to find a good reason why anyone would be against this change. Committing keys is a very easy mistake to make, especially for a junior dev. Github is littered with secret keys committed by college students trying to figure out web development for the first time.

I did the same thing when I was fresh out of college and new to both git and using web apis. Luckily it was just a Spotify key and not one for my Dropbox or email.

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

#145

Post by wenc »

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.

Well I guess there's Foundationdb [1] and cups [2] but those were acquisitions.

[1] https://github.com/apple/foundationdb [2] https://github.com/apple/cups

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

#146

Post by hajderr »

sethammons wrote: post #111
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 c…

Yes and I'd like to put an emphasis on the last point, soft skills are really important.
Post reply on HN