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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

I'm at Google and I wish each engineer got some kind of budget (like the peer bonus budget) that could be used to distribute funds to third-party libraries. My project is itself open source, does not run in the Google prod environment, and thus is heavily reliant on other open source libraries. I wish I had, say, $1,000/year to personally distribute amongst our dependencies. I think what's holding this back is how logistically/legally complicated it is, especially considering how many of the donations are going to be international and might have tax consequences requiring issuance of a 1099. It's easy to donate to non-profits through work (we have an annual amount we can give, plus matching funds), but for donations to individual developers, the logistics are nigh impossible.

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Given that you are a Google engineer, you could probably just pay the $1000/year yourself? That sounds weird at first, because why should you pay for Google's costs. But then again the reasoning is that Google should pay, because they depend on these libraries. But you depend on Google, Google depends on the libraries, so you depend on the libraries. So you not paying is pretty much the same thing as Google not paying: I can understand very well why you don't; because you don't have to.

Some problems with that:

Why should I personally pay for the tools I use at work to make my employer money? Should I also buy my own work laptop? My own software licenses? It doesn't make sense.

Then there's also the tax issue, as others have pointed out. I'd be giving post-tax money in a lot of instances, whereas for Google it would have much more favorable tax treatment.

But the biggest problem is that me personally making $1000/year of donations is pissing in the ocean. It accomplishes nothing. A program where every engineer is doing so accomplishes a lot more.

> Why should I personally pay for the tools I use at work to make my employer money? Should I also buy my own work laptop? My own software licenses? It doesn't make sense.

Wait til you hear about the amount of tools trades people have to buy for their jobs!

Yeah I know about that, and it's terrible and shouldn't happen. Thankfully that plague doesn't affect our industry, and I'd hate for it to start.

(Also worth pointing out that some of those tradesmen are legitimate contractors, and own their own tools in the same way that a legitimate software engineer contractor would own their own computer and IntelliJ license.)

Only if they are self employed though surely?

It's common for car mechanics and construction workers, especially in specializations like electrical or HVAC, to own and use their own tools. Obviously, better employers provide stipends or some form of compensation.

In which country is this??? Definitely not in Europe

The same country that bankrupts people when they get sick.

OP doesn't depend on Google. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement, not one of dependency. Perhaps if Google was the only employer that would hire OP, but odds are they could quickly get a different tech job at a thousand different companies.

Your argument could be used to say that OP should pay out of pocket for server hardware to run their programs that Google uses, which doesn't make sense.

No matter where OP works, they would depend on open-source software. I think the question of dependency is without a doubt here.

My argument cannot be used for server hardware, because, after all, Google has to pay for that.

But they(probably) would depend on different open source software

Because the benefit is for Google. Alternative would be to develop in-house or buy a 3rd party library for higher cost to the company.

I assume because donations would, ideally, be tax deductible through the company (or at least would have no personal tax repercussions) whereas making a donation of a gross cost of $1000 to an employee might mean only donating $500-600 net.

I am sure Google would be happy to deduct this from your salary and donate it instead.

You are making some weird arguments in this thread. I don't understand how you think it's reasonable for employees to personally shoulder the burden of everything they use at work rather than work simply paying for it, which makes a lot more sense and is the way that things are typically done. Start deducting the cost of work tools from employee's salaries and suddenly your employees are going to become very inefficient at their jobs, as they won't want to spend their own money on anything.

Sure, from a strictly logical viewpoint you are correct. There is too much red tape and its really Google's problem to fix. And you giving $1000 wouldn't even solve the larger problem of Google not having a system for you to direct them to make the donations. But in both of those cases the project still doesn't have the $1000. You could always just give it to them, on average you'd hardly notice and you might even feel good about what you've done.

My overall political philosophy here is that individual elective donations solve few problems, and that large-scale collective action (whether by governments or large employers) is a much better solution overall. E.g. SNAP is a lot more effective and efficient at ensuring that people don't go hungry than relying on individual people to continuously choose to donate food/money.

Same for this. One individual elective donation to an open source project doesn't do much. A larger system though can do a lot.

Yes, my argument sounds weird. About as weird as Google paying for software they don't have to pay for.

Maybe rephrasing my argument makes it more palatable to you: Shouldn't we, the guild of software engineers, take care of our own and pay our sub guild of open source developers? Why would we leave that to faceless companies?

That sounds like just a difference of semantics and accounting of the same notion. In net, your suggestion also results in $1k moving from google to the open source. Although that is modulo tax implication differences, since open source projects have not often been able to secure 501c non-profit status from the US IRS, which would facilitate those sorts of pass-through donations easier.

> In net, your suggestion also results in $1k moving from google to the open source.

It also amounts to a $1k pay cut for employees, which no one will be happy with. We already capture a small amount of our value add to the company in terms of wages; this would just make that a little worse. And no, there is no fixed amount that goes to salary plus open source contributions, necessitating the same overall net sum.

As does yours. But you are using an economic trick to hide it from yourself. See the "Save More Tomorrow" plan by Nobel Laureate Thaler and Sunstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)#cite_ref-21

It is not really different from whether the company pays for your office space, laptop, and health care, or makes you pay for those out of pocket.

It's not an economic trick. If my employer weren't paying for offices they wouldn't be plowing the rest of that on top of my salary. Indeed it's the opposite; fully remote workers make less.

It would probably be way more tax-efficient for the company to donate,

> I'm at Google and I wish each engineer got some kind of budget (like the peer bonus budget) that could be used to distribute funds to third-party libraries.

One of Andrew Yang's policies when he was running for president was to give every American $100 to allocate to whatever non-profits they wanted. This is really the kind of policy we need to drive open source. I'd love to open source more software myself, but right now the thought have having 25 million people using my code commercially and making maybe 5k a year if I'm lucky isn't super appealing.

It sounds good, but will run into problems when implemented at scale because of greedy people, jerks, and scammers.

You will see a cottage industry of OSS projects that serve only serve the purpose of parting people from their money. This is already something we see in the non profit space. But there the extent of the fraud and the damage it causes is limited because there isn’t enough money to attract scammers en masse.

In Seattle we have Democracy Vouchers funded by the city that every voter is sent in the mail and can be used to make campaign contributions.

This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers. He raised over 350k from democracy vouchers.

When the election came around, far fewer people voted for him than contributed democracy vouchers.

And the program administrative and overhead costs are quite high, approaching the level of total funds distributed to candidates.

Just pointing out that handing out money isn't free (although it is one of the true core competencies of the US federal government), and can have unintended unproductive side effects.

Just want to point out that this is pretty much WAI: a candidate who sounded promising but wasn't getting funding got airtime, turned out not so great, and failed.

Saying a person should be in the race shouldn't mean that you definitely think they should win it, especially in a FPTP system.

> This led one candidate to hire people to solicit/collect these democracy vouchers.

This sounds like what you'd expect an actually successful/winning candidate to do as well (explore all net positive fundraising avenues). The issue is, this guy wasn't actually a good candidate, and didn't excel at anything else.

lmao thank god he did not win.

Maybe an internal voting system, where every SWE gets 1 vote, but they submit a couples projects (as a fallback mechanism), so at the end of the yr all donations get bunched up & paid out together. Then if the money can't go to the first project for whatever legal reason it goes down to the next one of their list.

It's still a complicated system so it'd would take serious buy in. Not to mention the drama donations generate internally and publicly. But it's a noble goal.

$1000 per engineer grant might still be easier and less fragile

This is part of what Spotify did to determine urllib3 as an award recipient: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2022/04/announcing-the-spo...

This is what Microsoft does, basically. Each month, $10,000 is donated to some project. Anyone who has contributed to any open source repo during that month is eligible to vote. There's a good nomination system, too. The write-ups for each candidate are done by employees.

I still like OPs idea of it being more 1-to-1, where the engineer votes their $1000 on a specific project and that's the project that gets it. It's not just a ranked voting mechanism where a top few get it.

The system would only be there to bunch up "votes" so if multiple people choose one project it gets paid out in one bulk payment w/ a fallback to other projects if that payment fails.

Yeah, I'd be prefer that as well. But I understand why it might be harder to accomplish.

$10,000/month for a company the size of Microsoft is so little, though. And only one award per month is way too few as well. I still like my idea of $1,000/yr/engineer of allocations, with monthly batching on the rewards. Also you'd be able to see which projects are already getting substantial support, and then maybe use that information to reward your smaller dependencies that aren't getting as much attention.

Check out the Open Source Peer Bonus Program: https://opensource.googleblog.com/search/label/peer%20bonus

I'm aware of that program, but I think it has some problems. It only happens twice a year, there's a lot of process involved that dissuades people from bothering, the amount of money involved is tiny, and the awards only go to individual people, not general funds for open source projects. What I'm suggesting would be a LOT more total money and would be a continuous process (make the limit $250/quarter).

Part of the joke here is that Google is borderline allergic to using open source software that it doesn't maintain.

Not remotely true in my experience. Have you worked at Google, and seen the sheer size of third_party?

Yes I boomeranged for a total of around 4 years, (ldap mgraczyk). I am aware there is a lot of third party code, but compared to the rest of the world, google is very averse to open source that it doesn't control. See for example frontend frameworks (react vs lit), ML frameworks (tensorflow vs pytorch), javascript transpilers (closure vs everything else), C++ logging, C++ unit testing, C++ anything basically.

It seems like Google is slightly better about this in the Java world, but for the languages I mostly use Google is more guilty of "Not invented here" than other places I have worked. It's possible most of the code in third_party is written by Google, btw.

I don't know what to say other than that my experience here is precisely the opposite of yours. Different areas of the company? I use a LOT of third party libraries in the course of my employment, and third_party in my experience is full of legitimate third party libraries, not ones that are developed by Google.

Anyway, here's the list of dependencies for my project. There's a lot of third-party stuff in it: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/dependencies.g...

I think they're leaning in the direction of "Google doesn't like open source because they made Bigtable instead of using MySQL", which, at least when I was there, was a debate that spawned many centithreads.

Generally, I miss 99% of the internal stuff at Google. Prometheus/Grafana is very disappointing compared to Monarch/Panopticon, for example. I also like Go a lot more than Java. So generally, I had no complaints about NIH when I was at Google. Whether it's the best use of their money is up for debate, but I never found them hostile towards open source. (I was also a third_party reviewer. Lots of people using open-source libraries at Google.)

Yeah, that could be it. But in a lot of cases Google is writing its own stuff for real reasons.

Maybe I'm just older / have been in more diverse parts of industry, but I've literally worked at employers where open source software was verboten (this used to be quite common even). Compared to that, my use of dozens of open source libraries on my current project at Google is open source heaven. Sure, a smaller startup might be using even more open source libraries because they don't have the resources of Google to write stuff like Monarch/Panopticon for internal use, but to my eye that's orthogonal on the issue of open source friendliness.

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