Comment by borplk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by borplk | Hacker News Reader

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It's all our own fault.

We glorify the noodle-eating couch-sleeping code-generating-machine hacker and let the corporations profit by exchanging our health and personal lives for stupid hacker-perks which costs the companies nothing.

Woohoo! come hack for us, we give you a fancy chair and large monitors to stare at and even food! what else do you want out of your life?

We need to see that we are being taken advantage of.

We have raised expectations so high, that you can't land a decent job unless you have dedicated your evenings to patching bugs in open source projects for free.

What do you think that says to an employer? Sorry to break it to you but it roughly goes like this, "The poor bastard has no life. When he goes home, he does the same crap for fun. He'll be more than happy if I pay him 2 peanuts"

Have you asked yourself why other professionals don't have "open source" like we do?

If programmers are expected to work for fun to develop your email client, web browser, server softwares etc... it is only fair if lawyers were also expected to contribute to cases for free.

I'm too damn tired of this crap. We have put ourselves into an infinite loop of competition that only hurts ourselves and brings profit to the corporatoins. The guy next to you has to sacrifice his life because he needs to compete with you to stay relevant and you do for the same reason and so on...

We are smarter than this. We deserver better than this. We need to bring this to a stop.

In other professional fields (like with lawyers), doing work for free is called "pro bono". I would think that if you're being interviewed for lawyer position they would ask you how much pro bono work you've done.

So I disagree that doing this stuff for free is inherently bad, but I fully agree with the sentiments of the rest of your post. Particularly this: "come hack for us, we give you a fancy chair and large monitors to stare at and even food! what else do you want out of your life?"

An old manager of mine was once on the phone to a recruitment agency trying to hire some developers complaining that they hadn't made progress, at one point he screamed, "it's software development, it's not fucking rocket science!" He did that in a room full of developers.

For some reason many non-technical people get to become managers of technical people and have that kind of opinion. This then leads to the, "well if it doesn't work you can stay here all night until it does" mentality.

I'm not all that familiar with the field of law but I'm almost sure the "pro bono" work does not compare with the amount of effort that developers put into open source projects.

And even if law is an exception, just consider a lot of other professions, accountants, bankers, managers etc...

How much open-source-equivalent work do they do? How much do they have to do?

What have been the achievements of any of this work for other people (if any)?

Compare that to the things that open source community have achieved, entire billion dollar companies are relying on these technologies that started off as hobbies or what not and are maintained and developed further by the community.

Given the achievements, I think we deserve a lot better than what we are getting.

To be very honest. Software development is NOT rocket science. Writing corporate CRUD code is not that difficult...

Writing a new 3D game engine is off course more daunting but still not rocket science.

One difference software engineering has with aerospace engineering is that the people building the rocket get all the time they need. Since it's rocket science it's pretty much a given that if it's rushed or a PM or CEO puts the pressure on (with people working triple shifts for instance) then things just literally blow up.

In software the coders rarely have the option or will power to push back against unreasonable deadlines and fantasy launch dates. This is especially common in corporate cultures where a chain of command makes those calls and large scale plans are built around dates pulled out of the air. At best the coders are given lose-lose choices: miss the date or ship a broken product.

Sometimes I wish it was rocket science, since rocket science is at least a science. Corporate CRUD application usually have so complex and contradicting and vague requirements that sometimes software developer has to be very at mind-reading just to figure out what he has to do. And that works until the next change request when it all starts again.

I'm sure it's a lot harder than the manager to which I refer could do. In fact - it's a lot harder than many could manage, and whilst not literally as hard as rocket science, it's still a lot harder than some other fields. For example, "management".

You're right, producing a quality, x million line application that's bug free on a deadline is not rocket science; its harder than rocket science.

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