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Comment by emersion | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of the developers contracted by Valve to work on gamescope, wlroots, Mesa, the kernel, Wayland, etc. Really happy that my contracted work helps not only SteamOS, but very often the whole ecosystem. Examples include radv/amdgpu fixes, tearing page-flips, a re-usable library to make use of KMS planes, and the list goes on.

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Can I ask how it's decided what you are working on?

Given the variety of the projects you've mentioned it could seem that you have some degree of freedom, but I might be mistaken.

Yeah, there is a lot of freedom, it's pretty similar to how an open-source project works. Pierre-Loup indicates what features would be nice to have (in gamescope or other projects), I can pick from that list. Or I can pick my own ideas and work on these. Or I can discuss with the other contractors, come up with an idea and coordinate our work. Sometimes I work on short-term bugfixes, sometimes I work on long-term plumbing efforts.

I assume they're referring to Pierre-Loup Griffais, a Valve engineer dedicated to the Steam Deck and Proton.

https://twitter.com/Plagman2

That all sounds great. I must say I'm quite envious of your job. Getting paid to work on something that benefits the whole community, and with a great level of freedom!

Unfortunately my skillset as a senior full stack dev seems rather irrelevant for jobs in and around OSS. It appears those jobs are mostly C and C++.

is it public what they're paying these contractors?

I recently interviewed for one of these open source dev positions (Proton). From what I could gather from my conversations with the hiring manager, its somewhere between 120K to 160K for C Devs.

No, but why would it be. I'd expect a competitive pay.

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