I understand this is a jaded take, but it's not wrong.
Open source entered a bubble because companies started requiring active open source contributions to staff+ engineering requirements. The model was never sustainable. A select few contribute to open source out of sheer passion, but the majority are/were using it as a career advancement mechanism or network effect.
The result is that major companies were able to advance their technology and profits rapidly off of people's free work. The result is better products, services, and tooling for everyone, but let's not kid ourselves about who benefits most from open source: large companies.
This is what I dislike about OSI. It feels like their mission is specifically to provide free labor to megacorps. The FSF has (IMO) goals that have a more tangible benefit to society, and while megacorps can and do use free software without contributing anything, that feels like more of a side effect than the primary goal of the movement.
If you know that someone is going to take your code and make money off of it anyways (which is almost guaranteed whether you pick an FSF or OSI license), then you might as well make it so that society can benefit from this too. GPL/AGPL do this, MIT/BSD/etc do not.
And as an aside, I feel like it should be easier to profit from open source if you pick a license like AGPL. Companies that want to use it can pay you (the sole rights holder) for a commercial friendly license, while everyone else can use the free license. This is the same model for Qt/KDE.
You don't even need to sell support, and could probably even throw up a self service checkout page for commercial licenses. Thats minimal effort for maximizing profit lol.
Maybe I'm naive but I get the feeling open source is more about convincing the megacorps that they can get better, cheaper and higher quality software without vendor lock-in by cooperating with the other megacorps. Not so much as convincing volunteers that doing open source in their time off is some great idea or that they can make a living off it.
> who benefits most from open source: large companies.
Maybe in absolute terms but because of FOSS software I have been made free from the shackles of the windows ecosystem and liberated from the prison of Apple lock in to be free forever in the fields of the Linux and that alone has been invaluable to me.
Agreed. If someone has a deep enough understanding of engineering fundamentals, moving bits is moving bits. It doesn't matter what use case is sitting on top of it.
Also - Let's not act like Twitter is absurdly complex. Handling that amount of traffic was hard in 2008, yes. It's not hard in 2022. The app itself is what? CRUD with stream processing? Some complexity with scaling that, but it's not self-driving... that's for damn sure. Even if they haven't reached L5 yet, L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
> L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
It is but it's a different problem. Solving Fermat's last theorem is an infinitely harder problem than, say, speedrunning Minecraft in under 13 minutes but you won't see Sir Andrew Wiles doing the latter - because they are different skillsets.
edit: No idea why I typed Simon Wiles, I know full well his name is Sir Andrew!
> Agreed. If someone has a deep enough understanding of engineering fundamentals, moving bits is moving bits. It doesn't matter what use case is sitting on top of it.
VERY few developers are at this level, though. Most (>99%) are stuck in some paradigm associated with their typical tasks.
We always seem to forget that the majority of US citizens identify as conservative or moderate. Personally, I'm middle-left and found the endless hordes of far-left mobsters to be as equally unappealing.
It appears the country is finally trending back to moderate after the dumpster fire that was the last 7 years. Will companies continue to be hyper focused on political stances now that they're missing earnings? I think companies will leave the virtue signaling to the internet and get back thinking about how to maximize revenue. If people use the platform, and companies get click-through, I think they will advertise on it.
Great reply from someone else around generational shifts. That essentially answered this for me.
To give a troll response:
In the current context, I guess it means someone who doesn't live on the internet complaining about issues they do nothing about as if it does something tangible to change the real world.
Political labels only have meaning in the context of a given time and place. What’s moderate in one place and time can be extreme in another. What’s right-wing at one place and time can be left-wing at another. (And in both cases, the converse is also true.) Obviously the person you are replying to meant those terms in a contemporary US-centric context - a “moderate” in the US is likely to be a fair way to the “right” by the standards of some countries, and a fair way to the “left” by the standards of others.
Both Obama and Biden (and Bush) delivered a couple of wars to the military industrial complex to make trillions of dollars on. If you don’t deliver wars, the media will punish you. That’s what I learned from the past 20 years of U.S. politics.
Advocating for surrender in Ukraine will, because that will get a lot of civilians killed, but withdrawal of the aggressor won't. And yes, this is consistent, the US should never have fabricated its pretexts for the Iraq war.
Or publicly stated that it “would depend” on how much the U.S. will help Ukraine. Only a week or so before the Russian invasion.
Reminded me of the statement that “the U.S. wouldn’t intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait” 30 years ago. Again only weeks before the invasion that then gave the reason for the first invasion of Iraq by the U.S.
Amazing how often these same tactics work and reliably lead to big sales for the military industrial complex.
The pandemic has made it more challenging. I've worked remotely for over eight years and managed teams for 4 of those years. Engagement feedback has dramatically shifted, with people feeling disconnected and needing more social interaction. Before the pandemic, people leveraged their local social networks and didn't need work to be their source of community.
One of the rituals on my team that has stuck for years is an hour block every two weeks for the team to simply talk. No plan, no forced games or activities, only conversation. It gives us a chance to learn about each other freely. No discussion (within reason) is off the table; we talk about anything from food to astrophysics.
Unstructured conversation has been the only thing that consistently keeps people excited that it's on the calendar. It's a chance for everyone to see the authentic side of their teammates and learn who they are.
Interesting, we’ve found unstructured conversation pretty much impossible on Zoom. No one liked the open ended happy hours, so they stopped. Games actually got people talking.
If common interests aren't found during the unstructured conversation, the manager should be probing for commonalities during 1:1s and using them to spark the conversation. Once the conversations start happening, they will snowball from there. Like anything, sometimes it needs an icebreaker.
Social media consumption really falls into the same category as addiction. Some people can manage doing addictive things better than others. If social media is having a negative impact on your life, stop using it. If you can moderate it and it has a positive impact on your life, use it.
As a side note, we have to stop blaming platforms for human problems. What social media has done to the world isn't new, it simply used to be contained.
I can't say that I agree with this. There are the productivity "influencers" who say a lot of things but don't actually live it. There is a high correlation between being a productivity based person and being successful. Most of the leaders you admire are highly productive people and employ practices to increase their productivity, they're just too busy to soapbox about it.
I suspect the "influencers" and the "productivity gurus" you two are talking about are the same people. A guru is a type of teacher -- the really productive people don't have time to teach anyone other than, at best, their successors.
Or perhaps they leveraged their success to reduce the amount of “busy” they have so as to make time to amplify the mindset or practices that helped them, because they think that can be their biggest gift to the world.
It's easy to have the wrong mindset around productivity. If an individual thinks that doing more always leads to better results, they're going to have a bad time. I use productivity as a tool to have __more__ personal time and reduce stress. I really think about what I'm doing and what impact it has on my day.
From what I've seen, working in large corporate environments, is that people make their own productivity prisons doing things that no one asked for or working late hours on something no one is waiting for. Individuals create the stress for themselves by trying to standout or impress others.
If someone doesn't care about career progression, which I'm assuming is most of the anti-productivity crowd, they can get along just fine at almost any company doing only the minimum requirements of a role, have a fair work/life balance, and live a normal life.
If someone takes a mid six figure comp package from a major tech company, they should expect to work hard going into that role. Those jobs aren't for everyone. There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding.
> There are plenty of less stressful work environments in technology that will pay someone a decent salary and will be much less demanding.
There are?! Could you list some examples? I would take a pay cut for fewer responsibilities if I could stay in tech and if it didn't pay like thirty grand, which is what you will make in support.
How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???
Go work for some bigco that is coasting on a great market position of a SaaS project and you can definitely find software jobs where you can work about 30hrs a week, make around 130-180k a year, and chill hard.
Only problem is that after a while you'll get really complacent and your skills may suffer. If there are layoffs and you have to find another job, you might be in trouble.
You shouldn't worry about falling out of the technology rat race. Everyone's stack is different, you would be lucky to time learning a technology with a particular job opportunity that is using it. You may as well just research it the weekend before the interview and be upfront about your ability to learn it.
You can't know every technology and in 5 years you will probably be applying for jobs with tech that doesn't even exist yet.
I'm not at all talking about knowing the latest tech when I say your skills may suffer. I'm just saying that in my experience, sometimes in a chill job your fundamentals as a developer can suffer. You can literally get worse at programming if you aren't challenged.
However, if you are an internally motivated and driven person, you can take that extra time and energy you get from the chill job and learn all kinds of things and become a much better engineer. The situation is whatever you make of it.
Well I think my skills suffer more because of work: after a day of "being productive" at work, I no longer have the time and energy to explore and learn new stuff, which is how I gained and expanded my skills in the first place.
Yes, the extra time you get from the chill job can go either way. It's whatever you make of it. If you use the time to learn, you can definitely learn more at a chill job than at a hard job.
In certain parts of governments, non-profits and academia, can be found jobs which both (a) have lower stress / better work life balance, and (b) use innovative tech which keeps one's skills sharp and up to date. These jobs don't typically pay amazingly, but sometimes have a good pension plan, and the option is always there to go back to well-paid higher stress workplace later to fix finances if required....
> How do I transition from a high stress high pay software engineer to a medium pay low stress other kind of technology worker like you have described???
Work literally _anywhere else_ but Sillicon Valley. These jobs are aplenty; they are probably at least 2/3 of all programmer jobs everywhere.
I've only actually worked for one company (1/5) that emphasized productivity and graded people on it. My default answer would be most of them. I would say the majority of tech companies are work/life oriented, especially compared to other industries.
Software Engineers and Data Engineers have one of the best leverage positions in the work force. If you don't like your current employer's practices, find another one.
I don't think working support is less stress, just less pay.
And I think many people think working 40 hours a week counts as a good or decent work/life balance, which is frankly absurd, even if one is working from home or has no commute.
A 5X8 work week is still essentially living to work. Unfortunately it is often the minimum one can get away with.
Putting the fate of our airline safety to the collective bravery of humanity seems like a bad idea to me. If I'm getting on a plane, I have no problems taking my shoes off and being scanned to have a better chance of a bad scenario not happening.
Open source entered a bubble because companies started requiring active open source contributions to staff+ engineering requirements. The model was never sustainable. A select few contribute to open source out of sheer passion, but the majority are/were using it as a career advancement mechanism or network effect.
The result is that major companies were able to advance their technology and profits rapidly off of people's free work. The result is better products, services, and tooling for everyone, but let's not kid ourselves about who benefits most from open source: large companies.