Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

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> Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author?

You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't. There are a lot of discussions that try to solve this problem, for FOSS as well as for other fields. Patreon, Gratipay, Crowd Supply and Kickstarter are just a few options that have tried to solve this problem with mixed success. There are many projects that are wildly popular or used in critical infrastructure around the internet that are chronically underfunded.

My opinion is that extracting funds from people online is a high friction event. When combined with FOSS projects that might be used by a large user base but where each individual derives benefit smaller than the friction of a funding payment, the project, or individual maintainer, has trouble with remuneration.

> "I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."

A pretty bad faith reading. Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.

> You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't.

I explicitly state there are a "myriad of possible reasons" and chose to focus on a sub-set of them (again explicitly). What I did not explicitly state was that given the wealth of possible reasons that the reality is nuanced and non-obvious. So, I guess I agree with you? There is a lot of other discussions to be had.

> Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.

Ok, How about:

"I have all the skills to be a good team member with an unfortunate tendency to only consider my own opinion of what is valuable is when looking at work."

Looking at the author's profile at the year the author indicated, I see a monero (alt-tier cryptocurrency that was very popular at the time) tip bot and a runescape emulation server. These are both projects that would be exemplary of all those skills you and I mentioned and yet they show an affinity to working on "things I like" rather than things that have real world value. Later in their history we find other projects like emulating popular websites but those are not the "successful (GitHub) projects" they lean on.

As a hiring manager, I'd stand by my read.

Great coder... we need to interview and prepare for a lot of work on the soft skills of being a software developer.

Hiring is a crap shoot. I am very likely wrong about this instance BUT I still have to make a call looking at all the factors and I would be more comfortable with someone who seems less likely to need supervision even if they are less skilled at the "craft".

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