As an employee your contribution to the world is just a little more than your wage. Which, since you take your wage home, is just a little.
My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
151–160 of 195 posts
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#152I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…
I've been a user of your project and it's fantastic. I think you're being too hard on yourself. The proliferation of marketplaces and assets to trade (and all type of projects, automated trading, market making, etc... that your project enabled) can been seen as a net positive, as a win win for all parties involved and more. From a microeconomic perspective, your library enabled access to startup using js and with rel…
Thank you!
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure you’re blaming the wrong people. I’m not now and have never been in finance - but blaming banks or traders for the Fed’s actions is prima facia ridiculous. And throwing in the whole ‘greed is good’ stereotype doesn’t help.
Did the fed lobby for the end of regulations and then immediately tank the world economy with a pyramid scheme? Blaming the fed for the bailout is like blaming firefighters for putting out a fire instead of the arsonist. That’s a pretty strange understanding of accountability. While the world economy burned to the ground and families went hungry, the financial industry awarded their executives with billions of dollar…
Which ones exactly and how did they pull off this apparent massive conspiracy?
Near as I can tell, Greenspan pumping trillions of near free credit into the economy is nearly if not more culpable than the loose underwriting at these banks - after all, if they didn’t loosen them, they’d lose their market share in near free credit environments.
And what about the borrowers that were signing up for these completely unrealistic loans? How do they fit in?
And the poor bastards bidding crazy amounts trying to get a house, any house, and also way overpaying in any real sense because of these crazy bidding wars?
It’s easy to blame amorphous entities, it’s hard to really nail down what was actually happening - and point out that everyone in the US was playing a part in a spiraling out of control mess.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#154I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable that these few lines of code are an…
Sounds like an amazing class.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#155I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…
Are your users compensating you well for this? Sounds like the impact you're having is making fintech serious money, so I hope you're getting some of that.
0 USD :)
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do find this aspect of human morality interesting... people get REALLY upset at freeloaders, to a degree that is not proportionate to the cost they add. We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders. I guess it kinda makes sense as social creatures, but it can be frustrating at times when you are trying to he…
> We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders. Is it also more than what we would lose to freeloaders if we did nothing against them? If yes, then it's indeed not rational. But if no, then it's just indicative that what we are doing is working.
I imagine if we stopped doing those things the number of freeloaders would increase.
So the net benefit is negative now, but it’s still better than the cost of not having the measures at all.
Also, yeah, it shouldn’t be easy to freeload. Make them work for it!
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#157"Word Documents": Now there's a blast from the past. In my last 3 decades, I've used a UNIX-style operating system as my day-to-day operating system.
It used to be that my ever-present problem was in dealing with Word Documents. Practically every document I received back then was a Word Document. They were ubiquitous. If you couldn't read a Word Document you couldn't do business.
I used WABI on Solaris to run Word itself in the 90s. It wasn't always workable. So a lot of the time I was dual-booting to Windows and running the true Office.
In the Noughties, I was able to stay in my UNIX-like system and run Star Office followed by Libre Office to read the fairly common Word Documents that came my way.
But now, in the early Twenties, I only just realised that over the course of the 2010s, all of those Word Documents just dried up and blew away. These days, I might receive perhaps one to two .docx files a year, and Libre Office handles them without me having to think about it.
But I think the biggest killer of Word Documents has been Microsoft itself. By trying to stay proprietary and keep the free Office suites continually playing catch-up Microsoft kept extending and extending Word's features. If you didn't have the latest (expensive) Microsoft Office, you couldn't read the latest Word Documents. People got sick of this and the world gradually moved, over the course of the decade or so, to sending and receiving .PDFs.
Adobe were smarter than Microsoft. They realised that a .PDF could be available to all, no matter what operating system one used, and everybody could use it. That being the case, everybody DID use it.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best PMs I've worked with have very clear understandings of customer workflows and needs (or work towards developing them) and communicate those to the dev team. They also make sure to share customer feedback, whether constructive criticism or excitement/thanks. It's really motivating to hear customers are happy and I don't know why a PM wouldn't share that good news.
It is valuable to have someone for the customer to talk to that is on their wavelength (often less technical and sometimes more domain knowledge), and who has more soft skills than you might seek in developers. Calming down an angry customer is a useful ability and that's not what you hired me to do. However, sometimes the problem is just technical, and every game of telephone makes it worse. I have had two week back…
Yeah, it’s sometimes a bit distressing to interact with the users directly if you haven’t done so for a while, because you find out they spend hours a day on tasks you never even considered and can literally take away with a few minutes of work.
Asking them to tell you next time doesn’t always work since they just cannot imagine that the thing that takes them hours a day can be fixed in 5 minutes, forever. I think they unconsiously don’t want their hard work devalued like that.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders. Is it also more than what we would lose to freeloaders if we did nothing against them? If yes, then it's indeed not rational. But if no, then it's just indicative that what we are doing is working.
I imagine if we stopped doing those things the number of freeloaders would increase. So the net benefit is negative now, but it’s still better than the cost of not having the measures at all. Also, yeah, it shouldn’t be easy to freeload. Make them work for it!
Your comment made me chuckle because it started "I imagine" and then reached a "so" as a "therefore".
Virtually every time you integrate anti-freeloading measures, everyone pays the price to catch a relatively small minority of people abusing the system. It does not at all follow without study that the suffering these measures cause are better than the alternative of allowing some level of growth in the abuse of the system to make everyone else's lives easier.
Every organization should do its own studies and reach conclusions based on what actually happens in its domain and location of operation. Anything else is likely harming people and more drum beating than solid work.
Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry
#160This is why all tools should start as OSS tools