Hacker News Reader

Comment by jevakallio | Hacker News Reader

Author of the post here.

Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS. Our team can already contribute to OSS on their work time when it relates to their work, or our own projects, but for the personal interest/passion projects without direct benefit for us as a company, it doesn't scale. Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a week.

We have failsafes in place in case anybody gets a bit too excited about free time OSS. We limit the Sauce hours you can do in a month for this reason, but nobody has hit that max yet, so it doesn't seem to be a systemic problem.

View on HN

> Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a week.

Is HR ready for this increase in applications from this post and the comments?

I guess they'll have to work overtime to process all the applications ;)

> Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS.

Why can't you?

Professors get paid full professor salaries to do "random research".

Doctors get paid full doctor salaries to treat "random illnesses".

I expect if you looked a bit closer, you'll find that "Random OSS" is maintenance that makes the entire ecosystem possible. Would love to hear from some of your engineers what they are doing to earn that $20/hr.

But professors are usually also required to teach classes or carry out other duties in return for getting research funding. They don't just get to randomly do whatever they want.

And doctors treating 'random illnesses' doesn't really work as an analogy–that would be more like if they could randomly decide to turn away patients they didn't 'want' to treat.

Here's an example of a project I worked on under this program - a website for a local community developer meetup.

You overestimsate the amount of random research a Professor is able to do these days.

Right on.

> Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a week.

The post mentions an exact clockout time as well - 5pm. Out of interest is it a strict 9-5 schedule, or is it flexible but 40 hours a week? Have you written anything about the no overtime policy or 9-5 schedule (if that's enforced) and how you find that?

It is flexible. We need to be available for client meetings, but otherwise we are encouraged to work at times when we do our best work.

Yes, you can pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS. They contribute to your team's brand, reduce recruiting costs and reduce team churn.

If they do too much random OSS to a point where it prevents them from achieving your business goals, you can terminate them.

Greetings Jani! (maybe you remember visiting in London the guy from Germany)

Really interesting to read this and from you via hackernews :D

Out of curiosity, what's the monthly limit?

It's set at 30 hours a month. This is not for budget reasons, only to discourage excess working off-hours. This adds up to about a workday per week, which is what we feel is reasonable.

You could argue that it's people their own choice how much they work - which is true. But sometimes this can become determinental to their health. I'm onboard with this idea to be honest, it sounds good!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com