Genuine question, is there any other professional field in the world where people work for free like how Software Engineers work in open source?
- Doctors/Nurses working at free-clincs,
- Legal professionals will sometimes offer their services for free to needy individuals (I don't mean no-win-no-fee, but more writing a letter to a landlord on a tenant's behalf)
- Many people in the accountancy profession will offer their services to local groups/societies as treasurers or to do annual accounts, (indeed the whole boards of such groups are often unpaid, but may be less of a profession),
- Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers,
As a more out-of-left field example, I recently met a really quite famous academic volunteering as a tour-guide at a historical house.
Pro bono legal work, which is unpaid, is actually a requirement for practising lawyers in some jurisdictions. New York is one such example.
> Often at least some members of a board-of-directors for a charity will be volunteers
Depending on how you define the terms, all of the directors will be volunteers.
The most common structure for charities is a board of trustees/directors between around 5 and 10 members, who are all unpaid and part-time. The board is led by the Chair(man, woman) of the Board, who is otherwise just an ordinary board member. The meetings are facilitated by the Chief Executive, who is not a board member but a full-time, paid employee of the charity.
Underneath the Chief Executive are other full-time paid staff who are supposed to follow the leadership of the Chief Executive, and who often don't get to attend the board meetings. This group may be any size between zero and thousands of individuals! Confusingly, some organisations call certain people in the middle-management of this team 'directors'.
To conclude:
Board: unpaid - '(Non-executive) Directors', 'Trustees' or 'Councillors'.
Staff: paid, usually full-time - includes 'Executives', '(Executive) Directors' and possibly many other non-management roles.
Some charities' boards get so large they become more like the parliaments of liberal democracies - Speakers, votes, elections.
That's only the most conventional structure - I'd be happy to elaborate on the edge cases too! :)
All of these have been, in the past, variyng degrees of professional.
1. https://www.makeuseof.com/collaborative-fiction-sites-improv...
2. Iron Sky (2012), Moon (2009), Norwegian Ninja (2010) all involved free collaboration, to varying degrees.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR6epSP_Xlw
4. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3491102.3517628
5. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
Woodworking, restoring old cars, building airplanes. These are all things that people do for themselves at their own cost. The difference is that software has a marginal cost of zero, so they hand it out to everyone and collaborate to make it better.
That aside, at least in Germany, there is a considerable amount of volunteers, e.g. in social work.
People say 10x Software Engineer, rarely 10x Electrical Engineer.
Most type of volunteer works require more people, with some level of organizations before it becomes effective.
While open-source software projects are often started by one very good SWE, as a hobby, in his own time: a very low barrier of entry. Plus, a project can live with a solo maintainer for a very long time. Though, I digress that can be detrimental in the long run, like the recent xz-utils fiasco.
A huge chunk of cost increases in modern high rise building (outside of land and taxes) is due to ever more stringent fire safety requirements.
I don’t, I’m grateful for those people existing. Regarding safety regulations, those were most often driven by tragedies that occurred prior to those regulations being in place. I prefer being alive over saving money
But trust me, I understand the sentiment. Housing becoming increasingly unattainable is a issue on many levels, I just think that there are other, worse, contributing factors to the overall situation. Compromising on fire safety or other reasonable safety factors effectively won't help anybody when there still is an ever increasing amount of institutional investment hiking prices on the market.
In that case if we applied the same make believe as we do with software, then sure a 10x electrical could exist, just think of what you think an avg electrical engineer does and 10x it, boom.