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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

If you have spare dev cycles, I'd say it's in your better interest to build a software product that will make you money.

You get all the advantages the author talks about, with none of the disadvantages that the commenters here point out. You get income, and you get something concrete you can point to when it comes time to interview for your next job:

"I built and designed somerandomthing.com from scratch. It's built on the mZungu stack and handles peak loads of 14k requests per second. Check it out when you get a chance. It pays my rent."

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Agreed. I find it admirable that people can produce code for purely altruistic purposes. I wish I had the time to do that in between my work that pays the bills and my work on my own project that will hopefully soon earn some money.

At the same time, I do end up using a lot of open source software as part of that work, and when I have issues with it, I do submit fixes back to the project. Sometimes they are accepted (in some form), sometimes they're ignored. This isn't overly time consuming, and if nobody did it, I'd be spending a lot more time fixing bugs myself.

Likewise, I occasionally open-source stuff I build that happens to be reusable. As far as I can tell, none of that code is widely used, but on the off chance that someone is looking for something exactly like it, it might save them some time.

> purely altruistic purposes

Nah, it's because it's more fun to work on open source code! I don't work on stuff that's not fun or not interesting in some way, so there's definitely always an element of self-interest.

I would like to mention building something that makes money, and writing open source code are not mutually exclusive.

When building something to make you money, you're not working with a large group of other developers or "giving back" to any community.

That's exactly why it's valuable to you as a reference for a future employer. "I built this whole thing" is way more impressive than "I helped align the dropdown menu on this one FireFox options window".

As to giving back, there's nothing stopping you. My latest for-profit venture has spun off two open source projects that "the community" can use in the future. Past projects have done the same.

The key is to do things to benefit yourself, with open source being a side product. That's how big companies do it. Why shouldn't it be the same for us little guys?

Well, not necessarily. "I collaborated with programmers all over the world using version control and bug tracking" versus "I built this thing." It all depends on context and what you are trying to say about yourself.

I guess it depends on the employer. A small startup company would probably be pretty impressed with the "I built this whole thing" scenario, because that's what you need when you're a small company. But my experience has been that most employers will be more impressed with the second "I helped align the dropdown menu on this one FireFox options window" scenario. The second scenario also gives you a lot of opportunity in a job interview to differentiate yourself from other applicants. You can basically show that, not only are you a hot shot developer, but you know how to work with people, you know how to explain your desired technical direction and convince others of the value of your plan, etc. Those are valuable skills most employers can't get enough of, and they're things they can't easily get from an offshore development house.

Being mostly from the US, lots of you guys are religious, right? Does contributing to open source projects boost your chances of going to heaven?

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