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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

If everyone complaining about GIMP in this thread (and most clearly spend a lot of time using it, myself included) donated $20 or an hour of their time to GIMP, that'd be another $2k or ~100+ hours of time donated (as of this moment) to help make it better.

I have to run to work, so I just donated $20.

https://www.gimp.org/donating/

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Expecting a developer who hasn't yet worked in the gimp codebase to make a meaningful contribution worth a positive dollar value in an hour is vastly under-estimating the cost of ramping up a developer.

In reality, if everyone in this thread tried to contribute to gimp for an hour, I expect we'd get two patches of any value out of it, and about 100 hours of time that did nothing but negatively impacted existing gimp developers.

There are two realistic outcomes from a "1 hour to contribute something" thing:

1. A trivial patch which causes more lost time ($) for the existing gimp developers than it creates value

2. A developer jumping into irc and trying to ramp up, which for about the first 6 hours of time will likely be a drain on the existing developers with no positive value return until at least 15 work-hours of the developer ramping up (and that's assuming a developer who is already quite experienced and can ramp up pretty efficiently. For some developers, the numbers would be vastly worse).

I would go so far as to argue that part of gimp's less intuitive UI is because of having more developers, and if there were fewer developers total the UI would be more cohesive.

While what you say may be true, it's trivia. If one of those devs who attempt a fix learn a little and make a more significant contribution later in life. Only hindsight is 20/20.

The point is, the GIMP project would then be paying (in time and/or money) solely for someone else to "learn a little", when they could/should be spending that time/money actively improving the product.

Pleasantly surprised that their Bitcoin donation route is as busy as it is. ~20BTC+ over 700 transactions ain't chump change!

$20/hr for knows-wtf-they're-doing programmer time?

$20/hr for doesn't-know-GIMP's-architecture-but-submits-a-possibly-useful-patch-anyway time.

If $20 sounds too low, feel free to pitch in more. I'm a physics postdoc, not a software dev.

You're about an order of magnitude off.

Please communicate that to the National Science Foundation (and by extension, the electorate). We're hemorrhaging some of our best scientists for that reason. I may soon join them.

Do people really expect to be paid market rate for open source work?

Why not?

Because I would expect that you generally sacrifice part of your salary for the ability to work on free and open source software full-time, much like you would generally take a pay cut working at a non-profit.

If you're doing brain dead admin work sure.

If you're doing a contract not for profits pay the same as everyone else.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. I'm a contractor and my hourly rate absolutely depends on how good I feel about a project. Working on (useful) open source is a plus. I wouldn't go down to $20 though.

That's senseless. Non profit doesn't mean "worthy cause I should want to die on my sword for" it simply means the corporate financial structure doesn't accommodate profit-sucking shareholders, nor building the corporate coffers from year to year.

If I'm doing something for free, I don't mind doing it for free (obviously). If I'm doing something for money, I want to be paid my going rate; otherwise, either find someone else or sell me on just volunteering. I'd never charge $20/hr for software stuff -- it's basically $0/hr (which is most of my time, by choice) or market rate. It's actually the market rate billing that free me up to volunteer with open source projects in the first place.

Studies back you up and suggest "Pay enough or not at all." Paying below market rate tends to just piss people off and make them feel insulted and undervalued.

That's interesting. Do you happen to have a link to an article or study about this so that I can learn more?

If you search for "pay enough or don't pay at all" you should have no problem finding sources.

I'm not going to link to anything here because that implies vetting and I'm not going to vet anything. This isn't at all hard to find.

Thanks, I couldn't get my search query just right. No need to be snarky, though.

I wasn't being snarky.

Eh, this line came across as pretty snarky: "This isn't at all hard to find."

(I don't necessarily object to snarkiness. And obviously, tone can be hard to judge in plain text.)

Oh, good god. If I really thought the question meant the person was being lazy or something, I simply wouldn't have answered it. I'm well aware that if you know what to search on, it can be easy, and if you don't, it can be impossible.

I did the search, found lots of stuff readily available, shared my exact search phrase so it could be replicated and explained my reasoning for sharing the search phrase instead of a link. And now two people are busting my chops for actually being helpful.

I bet no one would have said a damn thing had I simply not bothered to reply and, in this case, not bothering to reply would have been the jerk thing to do because it would have been unhelpful to someone actually sincerely needing help and it would have been done on a bad faith assumption.

Geez.

I'm not trying to bust your chops, I'm trying to let you know how you come across. If you don't care, that's fine.

> let you know how you come across.

To you which may mean that it is merely possible to infer snarkiness.

> If you don't care, that's fine.

Haha that doesn't help.

A bit late to the party, but still: Predicably Irrational, Dan Ariely.

I expect people will be paid fairly for their contributions. Are you in a position to be telling people what their time is worth? Or, possibly you're simply being a pessimist?

I think that "what people expect to be paid" is the very definition of "market rate".

I wonder what kind of wonderland you live in where most senior developers make close to half a million dollars.

It's called "Filter Bubble".

Define "senior". Senior citizen developers? Or you meant that title should mean stature? If you're still coding after being at it for >30 years then yes, you're worth that to help level up entire teams. But, yes, given the prevailing definition of senior, sure, they're worth nowhere near that.

$20/hr was a contract rate. Your 1/2 million presumably is a salary (base). Not the same thing. $20/hr is roughly equivalent to $20k salary. $200k salary is reasonable for a competent developer who can hop on adding features to Gimp.

In my reality no developer (even a sh*y one) makes $20k.

In my reality most do.

I don't think a developer spending one hour of their time could produce something worth $20 to GIMP. I'm not convinced you could even get a build and Dev environment even set up in that time for most major OSS projects, much less craft a good pull request and follow up to feedback.

I make about $20 USD an hour doing low-level work writing performant C and x86 assembly at my current job.

Granted, it's not my only source of income, but what is the average pay/hour for most devs?

For those skills as a mid-tier seniority developer, not in Silicon Valley in the land of make-believe? Probably like $85k-110k.

If you live in SV it might be like $210k or something absurd.

So, about $50 an hour for non-SV developers?

Plus benefits. A contractor or consultant will charge more.

210k is what you’d get as a junior though

Even FAANG in SV doesn't pay juniors over 200k in total compensation.

Check out Glassdoor.com.

They don't do it for the money but money helps them spend more time on it.

If you ask people to give $50, fewer people will than if you ask them $20 so overall they will get more money.

Anyone know which of the donation options respects privacy, and isn't paypal? Haha.

What's wrong with their bitcoin option?

Bitcoin runs on an open ledger, it's not particularly private.

There are people who don't want to use cryptocurrencies because of their downsides (one of which is the speculative nature of it or, depending on whom you ask, downright ponzi scheme).

Or...perhaps 15 hours of an actual competent developer?

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