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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

#81

Post by austincheney »

mscasts wrote: post #37

I don't know about you people, but I don't give a rats ass if the company I work for open source their code or not. I care what benefits i receive and mostly the salary and the possibility to work remotely. Also it is a positive thing if what I do is fun and/or meaningful.

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.

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

#82

Post by C1sc0cat »

onion2k wrote: post #5

Anecdotally, I look at the public repos of any company advertising a job I'm interested in before I apply, so open source certainly attracts some class of developers. The problem is the assumption that people who do that are "better" in some way. I've known some brilliant engineers who don't care at all for open source code; they wrote great code that no one besides the customer would ever see or use. That doesn't ma…

I tend to read the company report and accounts if its a listed company don't think I have ever applied to an company that had any open source.

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

#83

Post by C1sc0cat »

mariusmg wrote: post #21
onion2k wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>If you go through your dev career thinking only people who write and use open source code are brilliant I didn't said that. I have just pointed that even close source developers are using open source when working daily on their closed source projects. So saying they don't care about something they use daily is ....wrong. Also I didn't said anything about their level of brilliance :) >Not ever project is web. The sna…

You must be rather sensatiVe if that's of the chart

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

#84

Post by ishikawa »

oblio wrote: post #55
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…

I think your comment is close to the truth but not quite there. Companies don't open source their core business, basically an extension of "don't outsource your core business" ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-... ). Google: Search engine? Closed source. Ads service? Closed source. Facebook: yes, the network is important, but still: Ads service? Closed source. Data science stuff they use f…

I agree, companies like Facebook open source things that are being helpful for them, and in most cases, due to their huge scale, they didn't find anything similar and had to do themselves. For a company to open source its core product it only make sense when you expect to have revenue from enterprise SLAs and custom services, as it is the case of companies like MongoDB and Redhat.

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

#85

Post by C1sc0cat »

Kiro wrote: post #34

At all companies I've worked the code has been a big legacy mess and showing any of it publicly would scare off even the most junior engineer.

Exactly especially for those just out of university who probably have not worked on any system of scale.

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

#86

Post by fergie »

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…

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.

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

#87

Post by rq1 »

amelius wrote: post #70
oblio wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment is close to the truth but not quite there. Companies don't open source their core business, basically an extension of "don't outsource your core business" ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-... ). Google: Search engine? Closed source. Ads service? Closed source. Facebook: yes, the network is important, but still: Ads service? Closed source. Data science stuff they use f…

I guess another reason for Facebook to not open source their social network code is security.

Nice try. :-)

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

#88

Post by andystanton »

fapjacks wrote: post #3

I was listening to a friend's music podcast tonight and they were talking about how industry will seize on any shred of creativity so that they can use it to sell cars, and this contributes to people getting defensive about the things they like becoming popular. There is a latent fear that just over the horizon, some marketing asshole is waiting to get their hands on something that is meaningful to you, in order to a…

> I was listening to a friend's music podcast tonight and they were talking about how industry will seize on any shred of creativity so that they can use it to sell cars, and this contributes to people getting defensive about the things they like becoming popular. There is a latent fear that just over the horizon, some marketing asshole is waiting to get their hands on something that is meaningful to you, in order to abuse that connection so they can buy themselves a boat.

What was the podcast out of interest?

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

#89

Post by kqr »

spondyl wrote: post #31

I have a question for some other HNers that is kinda related to this topic. I've got a library built solely by myself that I'm interested in open sourcing. I'm tossing up between putting it on my own Github account, where it probably blends in with the rest, or putting it on the OSS page for the company I work for which, honestly, is a bit of a wasteland (numerous unused forks mainly) I guess I just wonder what looks…

Look up lokal laws before publishing anything. In some jurisdictions, you have no right to open source anything you bild on company time or propery.

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

#90

Post by AsyncAwait »

pjmlp wrote: post #48
acjohnson55 wrote: post #9

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. I'm a former Artsyer. There, a good bit of core product code t is actually open source, including the entire website and iOS app. As it turns out, the real value in most businesses is the data, business relationships, the domain knowledge, and the p…

> 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.
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