This is what kind of changed my view on FOSS as a way to make a living.
In all the companies I have worked through my career thus far, not a single one has contributed back in any form to the pile of FOSS libraries that they were using.
In all the companies I have worked through my career thus far, not a single one has contributed back in any form to the pile of FOSS libraries that they were using.
My team at EvilCorp contributes fixes to several open-source libraries. The reason this happens, though, is that two of our stronger devs said "the correct thing to do is to take the time to get these fixes into mainline," which they did. The answer to the question of "why" we do it isn't "because it increases our team velocity," but because we're software engineers, and that's what good software engineers do whenever possible.
On my case that would be the path to be fired.
In none of the companies I worked for, doing that would work without going though legal and all the necessary layers to green light it.