Joshua BarrettoIt occurred to me today that the social value of the open-source work I do in my free time has probably been an order of magnitude more useful to the world than everything I've ever done as a paid employee. Needing to seek a wage almost certainly makes me a less productive member of society than I would otherwise be.
The number of boosts this is getting implies that a lot of folk feel similar, and that's sad.
Cassandrich@jsbarretto It's normal (but not okay). There's very little paid work that benefits humanity at large, and when there is, most often it also involves enclosing that benefit to limit who can have it (like with things like medical research).
David Zaslavsky@jsbarretto That's true, but I bet there are also a lot of people who don't feel similarly and thus are not reacting to this post. Obviously I can only guess at the real numbers, but I would imagine that among programmers (or writers, organizers, etc) who have worked on #opensource projects, only a small fraction of them have had a meaningful impact on the world through those contributions.
@diazona I guess that depends on your definition of 'meaningful'. An extreme definition might be "is on the critical path to a human being receiving sustenance or shelter" but I'm of the view that there are more indirect or immaterial ways for things to be meaningful.
Aaron@diazona @jsbarretto I bet their open source work is probably still more positively impactful than their day jobs.
@hosford42 @jsbarretto That's what I'm saying, I don't think so, at least not for most of them.
@diazona @hosford42 The problem is that it's extremely difficult to measure the value of FOSS work. As an example, I maintain a variety of libraries in the Rust ecosystem. I had no idea who was using them, and still mostly don't. When I got my current job, I found to my surprise that several of them were already in their dependency tree. (1/2)
@diazona @hosford42 (2/2) Unbeknownst to me, I'd already been generating value for them (be it relatively marginal) before I even got the job. Because the value of FOSS is smeared across many social contexts, its value is much more difficult to measure than the financial output of a company.
Matija Nalis@jsbarretto
might be related to the fact that worryingly ever increasing amount of jobs have no humanity-improving purpose whatsoever, and are only there to for improve one company short-term position in profit-driven econony rat-race over others. E.g. someone works most of their career improving click-through rate of some company ad campaigns? Or helps increase "engagement" numbers in some social network? Talk about sad
might be related to the fact that worryingly ever increasing amount of jobs have no humanity-improving purpose whatsoever, and are only there to for improve one company short-term position in profit-driven econony rat-race over others. E.g. someone works most of their career improving click-through rate of some company ad campaigns? Or helps increase "engagement" numbers in some social network? Talk about sad
drbrain@jsbarretto I’m certain I volunteered at least millions of dollars in unpaid economic impact during a maintainership period of around five years, much more with interest
My indirect compensation I’ve received through employment and salary has been wonderful, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling jaded about returning to maintership of even a hobby-only project
meejah@jsbarretto I am extremely glad I've had the opportunity to get paid to work on nearly-exclusively free/open software in the last bunch of years.
It also has definitely paid less than other more soul-crushing opportunities, which I'm totally fine with.
There's so many neat things from "the before times" I _wish_ I could have shared .... "but, proprietary" :(
It also has definitely paid less than other more soul-crushing opportunities, which I'm totally fine with.
There's so many neat things from "the before times" I _wish_ I could have shared .... "but, proprietary" :(