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

91–100 of 146 posts

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

#91

Post by matwood »

Jyaif wrote: post #72
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…

For me the problem is that to create a brand around yourself you need a pretty damn big ego, and ego is just bad in a team setting. The best engineers I know have zero ego.

This is a great point. The best engineers are the ones working with their teams to get shit done. If someone on the team is more worried about their OSS contribution than getting work done, it can be a red flag that they are more concerned about themselves than the team.

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

#92

Post by fro0116 »

arendtio wrote: post #53
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…

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 small engineering feat, that afaik no other sync software has been able to replicate yet (OneDrive has this on Windows, but no other platforms).

The Dropbox client makes just about every other sync client look like toy projects in terms of technical sophistication, reliability, and general UX. There's a reason why they're so successful. And I say this as someone who doesn't even use Dropbox on a day to day basis (I use Syncthing as my daily driver).

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

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

#93

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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.

Not all open source is web crap. Not all open source is on GitHub, or has a website and is even indexed by search engines.

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

#94

Post by eeZah7Ux »

mariusmg wrote: post #12
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'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.

Where's the irony?

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

#95

Post by maxxxxx »

fergie wrote: post #86
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.

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

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

#96

Post by ghaff »

klwilson wrote: post #76
cwkoss wrote: post #17

Quasi-ethical business idea: Sell open source software 'ghostwriting' services It makes an engineer look good to have solid commits to an open source project on their github profile. The people who actually make the bulk of these commits put in tons of (at times thankless) free labor. Create a grey market for open source software contributors to sell their diffs (that they've already written and actually entail usefu…

You can already get credit in open source projects without doing anything. Be on the mailing lists, present at conferences, claim ideas that weren't yours, treat actual code as a "solved problem".

You don't need to be a developer to meaningfully contribute to open source projects.

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

#97

Post by openfuture »

rq1 wrote: post #87
amelius wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice try. :-)

Security in this case meaning: "Keeping the truth of their business secure from the public in order to avoid backlash"

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

#98

Post by sethammons »

austincheney wrote: post #81
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.

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 disciplines effectively. A very, very small part of that is "quick coding."

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

#100

Post by sudhirj »

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 irrelevance in the Linux age by open sourcing .Net Core. So now you’re just writing code for .Net, not Linux.

FB open sources dev tools to both attack and defend the talent pool.

Google open sources Flutter to counter React, decides it can show FB how it’s done.

Google also puts out K8S because AWS ate their cloud lunch and they need to show they also get it. Now you’re just running on K8S, not AWS.

AWS just open sourced a JDK. Now we can all give Oracle the finger.

Apple sits in their spaceship, not giving a fuck. Chris Lattner tried to open source for the sake of OSS, with LLVM and Swift, but he left.

Post reply on HN