Anyway

Tim has a post where he advises developers to con­trib­ute to open source pro­jects so that hir­ing man­agers will look favour­ably on them. I have some prob­lems with this, as do many of the com­menters on his post. 

First off, I agree that con­trib­ut­ing to open source pro­jects is admir­able and to be encour­aged. There are, how­ever, a num­ber of developers who work for com­pan­ies with employ­ment con­tracts that say, more or less, any­thing vaguely code-related that you come up with while employed by us is ours, not yours. Which means con­trib­ut­ing any code to any out­side pro­ject is liable to cause prob­lems, or at least a cer­tain num­ber of hurdles. There are oth­er ways of con­trib­ut­ing to any com­munity that are argu­ably just as valu­able, such as tak­ing part in organ­ising events such as loc­al con­fer­ences, volun­teer­ing at loc­al centres that teach people how to use com­puters, assist­ing users on web for­ums, or teach­ing at loc­al com­munity col­leges. Con­cen­trat­ing on writ­ing code for open source pro­jects seems restricting.

The second issue is that it’s dis­crim­in­at­ory against those who simply don’t have the time. Work­ing single par­ents suf­fer par­tic­u­larly from this issue, but any work­ing par­ents of school-age or young­er chil­dren have the prob­lem to some extent. By the time you’ve picked the chil­dren up from school or day care, fed them and the rest of the fam­ily, cleaned up, taken them off to sports/music/whatever, helped with home­work, and done the laun­dry or whatever oth­er chores are neces­sary for that day, all you really have energy for is to unwind and relax. Espe­cially if you sus­pect that the tod­dler will sleep as badly as pre­vi­ous nights this week, wak­ing you up at mid­night, 4 am, and 6 am. When you have to be awake for the day job, as that’s the one that’s cur­rently pay­ing the bills, stay­ing awake into the wee hours isn’t an option for those who need more than just a few hours sleep a night to func­tion prop­erly. No mat­ter how pas­sion­ate they are about coding.

In my case, the pro­ject I’m work­ing on for my day job is the one I think about in spare hours at night and at week­ends. If I were writ­ing code, I’d be writ­ing code for that pro­ject in pref­er­ence to an unre­lated open source pro­ject. I don’t think that atti­tude should be pen­al­ised by hir­ing man­agers either.