What Keeps Developers Happy? Contributing to Open Source (techrepublic.com) 64
This week long-time open source advocate Matt Asay warned employers that the best way to keep their developers happy was to let them contribute to open source projects:
SlashData recently surveyed over 16,000 developers to see what makes them tick... what they care about. The data is collected in SlashData's State of the Developer Nation, though let me give you the tl;dr: 59% of developers contribute to open source software today. Why do they contribute? The top two reasons are: To improve coding skills and because they believe in open source.
Want to keep those developers happy and employed with you? Let them contribute...
[Y]our employees want to contribute both code and knowledge — they want to be part of something. Talking to Bert Hubert, founder of PowerDNS, a supplier of open source DNS software, services, and support, he stressed that an open source project must be "a fun place where people feel that they are learning things, that they're contributing things, that they're being valued." Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the same elements developers expect from their employers. By making open source a valued part of workplace expectations, employers tick both boxes.
Is it an absolute requirement that you encourage your developers to contribute to open source projects? No. But many of your best developers will chafe at keeping their talents locked up behind the firewall, and other developers simply won't apply if you have a reputation for being an open source scrooge.
The article was written by Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS. (Right before becoming Canonical's COO, Matt answered questions from Slashdot readers).
The survey he cites also found that out of 17,000 developers they talked to, just 3% said they were paid to contribute to open source.
The other 97% contributed for free.
Want to keep those developers happy and employed with you? Let them contribute...
[Y]our employees want to contribute both code and knowledge — they want to be part of something. Talking to Bert Hubert, founder of PowerDNS, a supplier of open source DNS software, services, and support, he stressed that an open source project must be "a fun place where people feel that they are learning things, that they're contributing things, that they're being valued." Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the same elements developers expect from their employers. By making open source a valued part of workplace expectations, employers tick both boxes.
Is it an absolute requirement that you encourage your developers to contribute to open source projects? No. But many of your best developers will chafe at keeping their talents locked up behind the firewall, and other developers simply won't apply if you have a reputation for being an open source scrooge.
The article was written by Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS. (Right before becoming Canonical's COO, Matt answered questions from Slashdot readers).
The survey he cites also found that out of 17,000 developers they talked to, just 3% said they were paid to contribute to open source.
The other 97% contributed for free.
Hookers and blow? (Score:1)
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Yes, but successful developers didn't qualify for stimulus checks, just poor ones.
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Wow, you consider under $150k to be a failure, eh?
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Re: Hookers and blow? (Score:1)
It's pretty easy to blow past that with stock even if you make below six figures on your base.
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No. That's not even how income works, or how stocks work.
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Well, we want to leave something to the world. (Score:2)
Make a difference. Like everyone else in the world.
Often, that is kids.
For developers those kids may be in code form.
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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
1. Physiological needs: The job should pay enough to buy you food and shelter, as well working conditions should be clean and healthy.
2. Safety needs: Work should be steady and pay is enough to buy more then you just need to survive. This is where you have enough for a Mortgage and raise a family.
3. Love and belongingness needs: Here is where your work is appreciated and you feel like you are part of a team.
4. Esteem needs: Where you work is recognized and you get praise and rewor
I find a pay rise to be effective. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, making some nobel contribution to OSS to feel part of something bigger than yourself blah blah psychology 101 etc works for the kids, but for those of us with mortgages and families to support money is a better bet.
Re:I find a pay rise to be effective. (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect the employers whose work force cares heavily about Open Source and employers whose work force have mortgages and a family is a pretty small intersection set. And I suspect that it is the former set of employees that answers surveys like this one.
This is good advise for companies whose coders are under 30. For companies where most of the coders are 40+, not so much.
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I suspect the employers whose work force cares heavily about Open Source and employers whose work force have mortgages and a family is a pretty small intersection set.
I have a mortgage and a family, and I get paid to work on open source. I would not take a comparable job working on closed source, for many reasons. If you wanted me to work on closed source, you'd have to make me a much better offer to compensate.
This is good advise for companies whose coders are under 30. For companies where most of the coders are 40+, not so much.
Oh, and I'm 50+. Come to think of it, in a very few years I won't have any kids at home, and could have my mortgage paid off if I wanted. So will that put me into your category of people who could care heavily about open source?
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I suspect the employers whose work force cares heavily about Open Source and employers whose work force have mortgages and a family is a pretty small intersection set. And I suspect that it is the former set of employees that answers surveys like this one.
This is good advise for companies whose coders are under 30. For companies where most of the coders are 40+, not so much.
What makes you think so? I know many contributors for open source projects who are 40+. I am one of them myself. And no, I don't get paid for it. Admittedly I don't have any kids and neither a mortgage to pay, but that has nothing to do with my open source activity. (The first is an accident, the second was a personal choice.)
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Sure, making some nobel contribution to OSS
If you did make a Nobel-level contribution, wouldn't the prize be worth a couple of pay rises?
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There is no Nobel prize for software engineering, information science, or computer science, so you're not going to get a Nobel for anything that is purely about being a software developer. Nor is there a prize for mathematics, the field that is most likely to directly intersect with computer science. You might get a Nobel if your work intersects with an area that does have a prize: physics, chemistry, medicine, economics (not a Nobel in title but awarded by the same people), or conceivably the Peace Prize i
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Working for OSS also means you can have more visibility and show others what you have done. Which means it's better for your resume, and you can more easily get hired somewhere else ... which means money.
So definitely more like a long term investment than a pay increase, but good for your career if you intend to switch companies at some point.
Choice (Score:2)
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Absolutely this.
It isn't that contributing to open source makes people happy. While that does apply to some people, it's not universal.
It is that doing what they enjoy rather than doing what makes a profit and paycheck makes people happy. Some people enjoy certain projects, and open source allows collaboration so you can make large things as a group without the structure of the corporate environment. Other programmers do other things that they enjoy, such as playing games, flying kites, building a boat,
Open Source OS/2 Warp Clone (Score:3)
Well that's surprising. (Score:2)
And here I thought it was raise was how you showed employees that they are valued. -_-
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And here I thought it was raise was how you showed employees that they are valued. -_-
This special story brought to you by your employer.
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Fun story, in the last 'Agile' training we were forced to attend, the trainer was going on and on about how paying coders *less* was the way to make them more productive, totally misinterpreting various studies where highly paid participants tended to do worse at the tasks than lower paid ones.
The training was consistent in this respect between managers and employees, both being told that the work is where to find fulfillment, not pay raises and bonuses. Thankfully they seem to recognize that we will work f
Who knew? (Score:2)
Safe harbour (Score:2)
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Until you run into an open source project where the maintainers make it hard enough to actually contribute (e.g. being really really picky about coding style) that the motivation to get stuck in and write code goes away.
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Of course, then sometimes there is insanity.
For example I got to be in the middle of two people who cared way too much about whether to enabled W503 or W504 in pycodestyle (since they say exactly opposite things to each other). A purely subjective opinion that most people don't mind being one versus another, but two folks cared vehemently about it and bothered everyone about it.
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I will say that my professional coding efforts are pretty rewarding.
The key has been to say no when it is appropriate. I don't quite understand how it happens, but useless work tends to be generated, and successfully cutting things out generally earns gratitude. Not perfect by any means, it works easy enough when it's clear it kind of 'evolved' generally out of miscommunication with no one wanting it, and sometimes you have to go along with pointless work when there is a stakeholder that did cause it, but i
Nope. Money. (Score:1)
The key to happiness in the labour market is money.
If I'm selling my labour, getting the most money possible is the thing that makes me happy.
If the person buying my labour wants to give away the thing he pays me to produce, that's fine. But I want to get paid.
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Some people contribute to open source as hobby. I don't need any more money, seriously. I get money during workdays being devops for open source OS.
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The key to happiness in the labour market is money.
I used to think that, too. When I found a job that paid a LOT more than I was making, I took it. I then realized that I didn't like it, and went back to my old job. I'm happier at my old job, even though I make less.
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If this were true, then why are you wasting your time and talents in software development? Okay, so maybe "fetishist for hire" is out of the question, but seriously you could probably make more money spending all the time you spend on staying abreast of new technology on perfecting the art of negotiation, working on your social game and pushing to get into upper management. Especially once you become a manager of managers, by then, no one cares if you coded in some antiquated if obscure and difficult lang
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>> "why are you wasting your time and talents in software development"
That's a statement of fact that's entirely invented by you. I moved on some time ago.
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The key to happiness in the labour market is money.
If I'm selling my labour, getting the most money possible is the thing that makes me happy.
I agree: Earning enough is the prime motivation. But once I got there (25 years ago), contributing to Open Source projects turned out to be quite a factor for staying happy, especially when the work I did for money wasn't that great.
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Only to a point. Happiness has been extensively studied, and it was found that more money only makes happier up to a certain point, which lies somewhere in the neighborhood of US$75,000 per year. (Obviously that number will vary depending on the cost of living where you live; $75,000 in Omaha is comfortable but $75,000 in New York is not. And most of the data is from a few years ago, so the numbers will be slightly higher now due to inflation.) Additional income beyond that has little or no benefit.
Up to th
Nice random sampling! (Score:3)
So you asked a bunch of open-source zealots what they liked, and it was "contributing to open source"? What a stunning and remarkable result!
What about the rest of the world (which generally had no interest or otherwise stake in open-source? What motivates them?
Methodology (Score:2)
Anyone know how this data was collected? Just saying “a survey” doesn’t cut it. How were the respondents selected? Did they self-select?
I went to look at the SlashData survey, but it requires registration - now why would I want to register just to view one article on a site I’ll likely never visit again?
Anyway, it’s difficult to know what merit this report’s conclusions have - if any - until / unless we know what the methodology was.
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That "59% of developers contribute to open source software today" sounds ... completely implausible. I'm not buying that they actually surveyed a representative sample of all developers. (If they can show that they really did, then I'll eat my words, but I don't think I'll have to.)
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What counts? According to Github I "contribute" to open source whenever I fork a project, even if I don't make any changes to my fork; or when I open an issue. I have actually made some genuine contributions to open source projects, albeit very minor contributions and mainly to minor projects, but it's probably still an exaggeration to characterise me as an open source contributor.
Not this developer (Score:2)
All the children of the world, coming together to sing a song of peace.
And money.
(Honestly, a useful product that I enjoyed developing. That and crushing my enemies and hearing the lamentation of their women.)
Let them...or pay them? (Score:2)
As far as I know, almost no company has a policy that prevents their developers from contributing to OSS in their spare time. I doubt such a policy would stand up to a lawsuit in any case. The authors of the article want companies to pay their developers for the time they spend working on open source proje
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I refused both times and they backed down when I told them I would walk rather than sign.
web design (Score:1)
agile (Score:3)
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funny that if you were to ask bankers and lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Sources is fine, but I would be pissed if I were to know that a lot of the software is being used by corporations who use it to avoid paying for licenses on such software. In the end, some company like RedHat sells themselves to IBM who end up using it for their back end processing. Great, but I think that those developers who contributed to it got short changed, even if they knew it was going to happen.
Similarly in drug research. Scientists work getting paid by the public from Federal Grants. If they develop something valuable, corporations take over the clinical trials to bring it to market, but never really paid all the upfront costs, especially for research that was not successful.
I wrote some OS software, but I have had people ask me to support it by adding features. I could, but my time is valuable and I would rather be doing other things, rather than "just" developing software. I am also interested in Astronomy, Mathematics, Physics, [Kant] Philosophy, Computational Neuroscience and developing my karate.
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Scientists work getting paid by the public from Federal Grants. If they develop something valuable, corporations take over the clinical trials to bring it to market, but never really paid all the upfront costs, especially for research that was not successful.
The grants provide research for things the private corporations would never take such a risk on. Once it's proven (or close to it), it's more efficient for the private capitalistic sector to take over. The researchers got to work on something they're passionate about, which probably wouldn't happen in private industry (due to risk). Sometimes they'll get hired by the private companies to continue their work. Nothing is wrong about this picture. It's a good intersection of socialism and capitalism, using eac
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The same is happening with the buying the corporate debts that companies incurred to buy back their own stock. Boeing took out debt $100B to pump up their stock price 4X, using low interest loans.
Or the bail out of the American investors in the Mexican oil pipelines in 2000!
Sort
higher pay, career development, and autonomy (Score:2)
What developers want are the same things every worker wants: higher pay, career development, and autonomy.
This "study" seems aimed at shitty companies that are unwilling or unable to provide those obvious, proven incentives.
Two words (Score:2)
Where are the 59%? (Score:1)
Money (Score:2)
https://archive.vn/qW7jE [archive.vn]