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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately.

Open source is a niche. The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. If they do, it’s simple bug fixes that they need for their paid jobs. The number of people creating and releasing significant open source projects is vanishingly small relative to the entire pool of developers.

I think it was a mistake to tell entry-level devs everywhere that open source was some sort of secret cheat code to boost one’s career. On the hiring and recruiting side of things, seeing open source contributions is helpful, but it’s almost never the deciding factor in hiring someone. Meanwhile, Internet forums for juniors are full of anxiety about creating side projects and GitHub profiles because young developers think it will get them to the head of the hiring line. It’s a recipe for a lot of disappointment in open source.

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I have seen hiring manager on this site say they wouldn't hire anyone without opensource experience. Sometimes they say something wishy-washy about how contributing to open source is such a specialized skill that they don't have the bandwidth to train someone new. At other times they are more willing to blatantly admit that they just want someone who's capable of spending all their free time writing code.

I tend to wonder about the legality of it all. Since when did judging candidates on what they do off-the-clock become acceptable? To make it easier, if I don't have time to do open source because I am heavily involved in my religion, does that start to toe the line of acceptable work qualifications.

Significant part of open source development is paid for by companies. I don't know why the myth of its being done mostly for free persists, but maybe we should stop pretending it.

Depends on how you define "part". Maybe the visible part like MySQL or the Linux kernel or Android. But I'd say open source has a long tail mostly unpaid. From where I'm staying there is also a myth that companies pay for all the open source I use.

I don't know what open source you use. But yes, the big ones are mostly done by people who are paid for it. They are not after work occasional effort.

The smaller ones are also often done a part of university research or on clock. Not necessary because companies are altruistic, but because they need something and because open source developers need to eat.

A big part of Apache projects are not done by paid employees. Which is why you see the main developer for Maven push his Patreon for donations.

Out of the hundred or so resumes I have worked with at this point the handful that have had their github up that I had time to look at were net-zero or net-negative as an addendum of their resume. There's a difference between an engineer with a history of open source and one that 'did something and pushed to github', and most entry-level engineers haven't had such a strong history of open source that what you see of them would be meaningful anyway. I do try to preach this to what developers I come across but there's only so much that can be done.

If you work with web standard technologies your code is probably inherently open. Even still most developers in that space cannot write any original code to save their lives. They are utterly reliant on mountains of shit that does everything and they string a few build tasks together. As an experiment take NPM, Angular, React, or SpringMVC away and observe the forth coming violence like a zombie apocalypse in a third world nation. The entitlement runs deep.

Take away browser plus html? Sure. Take away React? People would get along just fine imo

I have hired a guy that was applying for his first job at the highest salary we could afford because of his phenomenal open-source contributions. We knew right away that it was a particularly strong candidate. We were right.

Most Github repositories I've seen since then are net negative and it would be better if they hadn't been included at all.

> The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source.

On the producing side, you mean.

I'd argue that including a package in your code is not participating. It's consuming, but not participating.

Football players participate in a football game. Fans consume that game.

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