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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this kind of a paradox? Most open source maintainers work in their free time on those projects, and have an additional fulltime job to cover the bills.

Assuming that everybody has the luxury to have additional office hours available is a bit far from reality in my opinion.

I mean, if you can offer office hours for an open source project you probably are already so popular that you are able to work on it fulltime, right? And if you're not that popular, you cannot offer office hours due to your daytime job; as you would have to decrease the rest of your remaining free time that you probably need to sleep and eat.

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In my case I'm still very much trying to encourage people to use my project. The time investment for office hours isn't too high - I actually dropped it down to three sessions every Friday for a while due to other commitments, so it's only an hour and a half a week.

In exchange for that I get extremely high bandwidth feedback from real users of my software!

It's a great idea, thanks for writing it Simon.

Looks like you're drawing conclusions from the title, which I also did!

Per the article, he's not saying you should work on the project during office hours. Instead, to get feedback from users, he's allocating some time where users can have a talk with him about the project. He's calling that 'Office Hours'.

I think that it's a really valuable suggestion.

I don't understand what you're saying. How is time spent gathering feedback from users not time spent working on the project?

I think you're missing the distinction between "office hours" (what most people would read as 9-5 Monday through Friday) and "Office Hours", the term Simon is using to describe the 4-5 hours a week that he specifically allocates to having discussions with his users. Which is completely understandable given that there's not actually a consistent capitalisation difference.

Of course the latter is still time spent working on the project, but it's certainly not in direct conflict with having a full-time job paying the bills.

It's more like office hours in the college sense where you go talk to the prof/ta to get your doubts cleared and stuff, the way i see it.

Ah, I see what you mean. People generally wouldn't say "run office hours" to refer to the first sense. That might be "work office hours" or "standard office hours" or "keep office hours" perhaps.

The article describes a practice for gathering feedback for your project: announce a set time when people can get on a call with you for a few minutes and discuss your project. The author calls this "office hours".

It's a useful piece of advice for people who are in need of such feedback, and can afford to block off a bit of time on their schedule on a regular basis. It doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a good trick if it does apply to you.

If I consider US-times, being based in Japan, I can probably use my Saturday morning to answer support queries for free

I assumed this was written from the perspective of someone trying to turn an open source project into a paying gig by attracting sponsors, patrons, etc.

> Most open source maintainers work in their free time on those projects, and have an additional fulltime job to cover the bills.

Are you certain? I'd think most open source development is done by paid developers, on company time.

Eh? You just make a little time for open-source in your day job by using the projects you want to work on :)

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