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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

if they are not ready/interested and its essential for you, you can build it or hire someone for it an may be push to main project

I think this changes the problem significantly. A feature request is essentially asking people to put in effort for you; that shouldn't happen if you have other options. If you're in a position to build something yourself, or to pay someone to deliver a feature you need, then that should be your first choice. Alternatively, you could propose sponsoring the feature eg paying the project owners to build it.

If the project owners are open to a merging the feature in to the project once it's complete that's great, everyone benefits from your effort/money, but requesting a feature that you could build yourself feels a bit wrong to me.

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When I’m managing a piece of spaghetti code, I entertain feature requests from a lot more people. It’s very difficult to add features to such code without breaking five different things. That’s not the requester’s fault. That’s the authors fault. I or the author made that bed, and somebody should goddamn well lie in it.

By the time the code is cleaned up, I offer advice on how someone else might implement it, unless I find something deeply philosophically engaging about the feature proposal, like thinking of something even better than what they asked for.

Getting mad at people who ask you to fix your own mess is a defense mechanism of people whose egos have outrun their abilities. I work with someone like that (and an enabler) and I will veto him ever working with me again. It’s a special kind of toxicity that feeds other people’s impostor syndrome.

yes, It happens. Just like rude users there also are rude developers. Once I tried the demo of a small CRM,I filed the bug related to it. Later Developer rudely showered me with comments like I am asking for free goodies and closed issue, and I later replaced my CRM with custom WordPress plugin ;).

My suggestions to fellow developers; Every bug, feature request and question (good FAQ candidates) is the contributions, if you are not interested in accepting, just be upfront and polite.

I was given a huge gift early in my career. When people are upset they do not communicate clearly. They get confused about their own boundaries and demand the wrong things. They are a storm that you sit through and try not to lose your shit too. The information content is negligible, perhaps 2 or 3 bits worth of data.

People ask questions when they are honestly trying to figure out what they need that they aren’t getting, and because you have experience, you can often see where they are headed (a vector value, if you will) “Out of the mouths of babes” comes wisdom that only you appreciate. Questions are, to me, the highest quality critiques I ever get, and the magnitude is relative to the number of people who ask me the same question.

Feature request is also useful when you want to create and contribute some new feature to existing OSS, the response from maintainer makes you know if it will be accepted in mainstream version or not, hence in my opinion its not always asking for others to put efforts, though mostly it may.

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