• flashgnash@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    I’ve actually found a lot of the smaller foss tools I use are better than their proprietary counterparts because of the design philosophy and that people don’t cut as many corners on passion projects as when they’re on a deadline

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      12 hours ago

      For real. I just spent a decade in academia working dog hours with little pay keeping services running wondering how the true devs and sysadmins do it.

      I recently switched to the corporate world and have peeked behind curtain of competency: headless chickens running around, patching failing products rather than spending time to properly fix them because immediate results are the only metric that counts.

      Stability, scalability, reproducibility? Forget it, that’s someone else’s problem apparently.

      • bastion@feddit.nl
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        9 hours ago

        Late stage capitalism.

        The issue is that capitalism fundamentally requires forward thinkers and enlightened (or at least rational) perspective to function sustainably.

        But capitalism rewards short term thinking, everywhere from corporate leadership, to the workforce, to the consumers caught by ads designed to catch and hold their ever-shortening attention spans.

        Fundamentally, it needs regulation to thrive. The true cost of a purchase, including environmental and decommissioning/disposal costs must be tied to the initial purchase value. Through this, we might get a functional capitalism.

  • HStone32@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    "Dear floss4life,

    Our developers have encountered an issue while using the open source framework you published on github. We have lost as many as 400 user accounts. The estimated cost of this error is $6800.

    This is unacceptable. Be a professional and fix it immediately.

    Chad Elkowitz, MBA, Gruvbert and sons Finance Lt"

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
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        14 hours ago

        And it’s also why many companies refuse to use open software. It baffles me that no insurance company saw this as a market opportunity to sell open source software insurance.

  • emmie@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    80/20

    I live by this rule, it made me gain so much credibility and money from people who don’t know any better. 80/20 <3

    20 percent of work nets you 80 percent of result (except no one knows what I did isn’t 100 percent) bam 4/5 of time saved. Everyone is happy and if something doesn’t work we can just blame it on client

    • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I follow the 80/20 rule recursively. as soon as I’ve gotten 80% of the way there for 20% effort I immediately stop, and start a brand new project for the remaining 20%. Bam! 96% complete for only 24% effort.

      taps forehead

  • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I love this meme because every app on my phone designed by a company worth more than a million dollars fucking sucks, and the best app on my phone is RIF, an app designed by a single developer, and reanimated into a lich by a team of programmers for free

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    Read “The Mythical Man-Month”.

    Basically, a team of 5-8 motivated developers can create high quality, medium complexity software extremely fast.
    But if the project is just a little too complex for one team of devs and you need more people, then you’ll need a lot more people. And a lot more time.

    Cause the more people you add to the project, the more overhead you have. Suddenly you need to pull devs off coding to bring new hires up to speed. You need to write documentation on coding style guidelines, hold meetings, maintain your infrastructure, negotiate with hardware suppliers, have someone fix the server room’s door locks, schedule job interviews, etc. etc.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Counterpoint: ‘The Brooks’s Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.’

      Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      It absolutely fucking BAFFLES me that Brooks’ Law isn’t known by every software manager on the planet.

      I’ve quoted it so many times at work, even in engineering focused teams in at least two big tech companies. It’s not a concrete fact, but it explains why so many teams are hilariously shit at delivering software.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    “All-star” makes me worried there’s some hidden society of super competent developers remaining at the big software corps that we somehow never noticed.

    • Alex@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      There is a very large corpus of FLOSS software out there serving everything from individual itches to whole industries. Any project that is important to someone’s bottom line is likely to have paid developers working on it but often alongside hobbyists.

      The project I predominately work on is about 90% paid developers but from lots of different companies and organisations. Practically though the developers don’t care about the affiliation of the other developers they work with but the ideas and patches they bring to the project.

      • Jake Farm@sopuli.xyz
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        2 days ago

        That seems like a better system than say, Godot, who picks and chooses who is allowed to contribute.

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      yes and they either become popular because of their usefulness and get organized like firefox/mozilla or they get co-opted by corporations and invariably enshitified like chrome/chromium

      • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 days ago

        Firefox/Mozilla as an example is a bit of a stretch, given the fact that Mozilla Browser/Firefox is originally based on the open-sourced version of Netscape Navigator

        • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          very true and as has happened to almost all projects once they get a critical mass of users and presence in the ecosystem.

    • RandomVideos@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      100% of the open-source software i contributed to was developed by hobbyists so, using that information, you can infer from only that information that only hobbyists can develop open-source software