Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 13:00:25 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Doug Barton <DougB@gorean.org>, Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <20000525130024.A4324@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <200005250051.RAA10662@usr05.primenet.com>; from tlambert@primenet.com on Thu, May 25, 2000 at 12:51:34AM %2B0000 References: <20000524130124.B46038@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <200005250051.RAA10662@usr05.primenet.com>
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We seem to have moved from "can software jobs/salaries survive in a free-software world" to "can software jobs remain interesting and challenging in a free software world". My take on that is that, in any profession, you can do interesting and inspired work and be paid adequately for it if you're good; or you can sacrifice some freedom and creativity but be paid huge amounts. Only a few achieve both, total job satisfaction and stratospheric pay packets; they tend to be the sort who enjoy management-like positions, or else be so good at what they do that they can demand any salary they want *and* be aggressive enough to make such demands and cut the best deals for themselves. My impression is that the software world is no different. The majority of software engineers (the people Arun was worrying about) treat it as a routine job. A lot of creative people choose to stick around in universities or in low-key system administration posts, so that they can spend most of their time doing what they want to do while earning a decent living. The people who have both the talent and the drive to make it big financially while enjoying their work -- I think they'll take care of themselves somehow. There aren't so many such people in the world and there are always places where they can fit in. > > The rich guy above will quite likely hear of your software, give > > it a spin (without fear of being called a pirate), > > No problem... > > > > and then hire you to fine-tune it for him. > > And _here_ we have the problem. This is neither long term > interesting nor challenging, unless you are very happy in your > cog spaced hole, or your work was not very inspired to begin > with. If you're that good, I think there are at least two things you can do: (1) Ignore his offer since you're getting more interesting offers with good pay. He'll find someone else, perhaps not of your talents, but the source code is there and there should be somebody out there to fix it for him. (2) Take his offer, since you're getting paid well for a minimal effort on your part, and use the money to subsidise your real interests. (Perhaps other software projects, perhaps music or foreign languages or whatever you want to do.) In practice I think you'll often be asked to write non-trivial additional features rather than just answer "how do I do this" questions. That could be both interesting and challenging. R. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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