__/ [ High Plains Thumper ] on Friday 08 September 2006 22:40 \__
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> PS - K3b has excellent reputation. And, amazingly enough, it's a project
>> that is funded by donation. It comes to show what levels of success can be
>> reached without a programming hen house (think undermotivates programmers
>> tapping on keyboards in a brightly-lit cubicle).
>
> Then after project is completed, they are promptly laid off.
Aye.
It's no longer their 'baby'. Ownership of code and control, as opposed to
central SVN/CVS/SourceSafe repositories where your work is being
'bastardised', is what motivates a programmer to excel and make his/her
program shine. There is a sense of personal responsibility and dedication
that comes with it. It also motivates those familiar with the code to
persist, rather than have someone who is 'foreign' harness something
unfamiliar (take Windows Vista for example).
You can never achieve sense of responsibility with a paycheck. Closed-source
software houses work under the assumption that people can be engineered to
work purely on money (i.e. on-paper figures). It's a production-line
approach which no-one truly appreciates. Not even me (and I worked on a real
production line as a teenager).
I have been offered jobs and been contacted by recruiters whom I asked about
'reinvention of the wheel', 'clone/copycats and programming that mimics
other offerings', as well as general work conditions. The thought of coding
for traditional proprietary vendors sends shivers down my spine. That's why
research is (still) different. Research and Open Source have a symbiotic
relationship, not surprisingly. It's just a shame that universities still
have a proprietary component in them, especially on the /teaching/
front-line.
> Shades of Monty Python, I remember days without cubicles. In the early
> '80s, I was working in a bull pen with 20 desks facing same direction
> toward isleway, like they were a classroom. I had a terminal on my desk
> and had to tolerate hardware and instrumentation engineers, technicians
> yakking away, whilst concentrating on my software writing. It was why I
> looked for work elsewhere after a year.
Good choice. Since you post in various groups in UseNet, you have clearly
found that there's more to life than being a slave for companies that want
the most cash, the most quickly, at the expense of the employees.
Best wishes,
Roy
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