Hacker Survey

Lisa writes "A new entry in Tim O'Reilly's blog, titled "Creativity, Flow, and Joy in Programming" talks about a survey of IS developers with projects hosted by Sourceforge. The results were presented at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention last week. 60% said, 'With one more hour in the day, I would program.' 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation. Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that 'When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music." OSDN has a page with the survey results in PDF or HTML. Slashdot is a part of OSDN.

Comments

With a 25 hour day

[bluGill]

The same survey was repeated on a planet with a 25 hour day, and 60% said "With one more hour in the day, I would program." 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation.

Re:With a 25 hour day

[3prong]

Good point. Reminds me of that quote by H. Jackson Brown:
"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."

GET A LIFE!

[MosesJones]

For pities sake this is just plain sad. If there was one more hour in the day 60% of people would sit in front of a monitor ?

This would mean 365 hours extra coding, no "I'd meet up with friends", "go to club", "get a girlfriend", "have a bath".

Given an extra hour in the day I'd spend an extra hour with my wife and daughter.

For pities sake people, Mozart shagged his way around Austria and Germany while composing. Artists are famed for going out and getting laid.

Folks get your priorities straight, have a bath, get a girlfriend, get laid. And spend any extra hours repeating the last step.

Re:GET A LIFE!

[dubious9]

# cd /
# mkdir life; cd life
# ./getLaid
bash: command not found
# ./takeBath -time=now -soap=true
# ./getGirlFriend
bash: command not found
# cd /pub
# ./beer
bash: Ahh
# ./findWomen proximity=10m
Age Looks(1-10) Description
46 5 SugarMomma
23 7 Nice, but baggage central
35 2 Looks like uncle buck
28 3 Smells like hotdogs
# ./beer
# ./beer
# ./flirt
search returned no hits
# ./beer
# ./beer
# ./beer
# ./findWomen -proximty=10m
Age Looks(1-10) Description
46 8 Wow!
23 10 Hot!
35 8 Damn!
28 10 WooHa!
# ./buyBeer forWoman=4
# ./getNumber fromWoman=4
bash: core dump
# ./getGirlFriend fromWoman=3
bash: are you sure? (y/n) y
warning: process beer is making system unstable proceed? (y/n) y
bash: Success!
# cd /life
# ./getLaid
bash: Success!
# ./sleep -until=morning

my cost

[jaymzter]

is lack of sex, especially when my wife wants to know why I'm "playing on the computer"!

I love programming

[Jacer]

most of the stuff I program is for personal reasons, i get bored and i'll write my own code, i know what they mean... writing code at work is different, i don't have any respect for that code, they tell me what to do and i do it, make code like this, but add these features, debug this, you broke that, ect. with my own code i can excercise my creativty, and i truly enjoy it

Very concise survey analysis

[McCart42]

I think the results were analyzed very well. I particularly like the way they took the results and separated respondents into categories by motivations and contribution status: "Professionals" (paid for contribution, and do it for the work functionality), "Hobbyists" (completely non work-functionality), "Learning and Intellect" (motivation is intellectual stimulation), and "Community Believers" (believe that code should be open, and feel obligated to use).

Another interesting result for me as an undergraduate was that while sleep is the biggest thing lost by contributing to SourceForge, not many respondents felt the same about academic performance--leading me to believe that even though so much work is put in as to lose sleep over it, it may actually benefit college grades--which is what I've been told all along. Extracurriculars don't necessarily hurt your academics, in fact they can enhance it by giving you something else to focus on and enjoy. All in all a good survey.

Re:HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that my wrist is larger than your biceps should alert you to the fact that

E) You wank all day long.

Snik snik. Now go mop the floor by the fryer.

Sourceforge

[bigjocker]

I have started two projects on sourceforge. One was on behalf of my former employer and we released the source code of the whole system under the Jabber PL. The project is still there, but neither I nor my employer is still maintaining it. You could add it to the "Project Cementery" of sourceforge (if they had one).

The second one was just registered a week ago. I have not yet released any files on sourceforge but have done so on my web site. Actually I opened the project just to have a mailing-list.

I spend almost two hours a day in this project, with almost five hours a day on weekends and on vacation. I have even asked for vacations at work just to get more time on the project. It's an open source project, but, even if a would like to have contributors I still have none.

So why do I do it? well thanks to it i just bought my new TV, freezer, laundry machine, DVD and PC. I give my project away for free, but charge for courses, documentation and solutions based on the system. As for today I have only had local customers, but I only hit the web last week.

As for the wife and kids ... well they all are way too happy with the new items at home, you know.

So they support me, I spend some time on my laptop and we all get new toys. Thanks to the LGPL (which is the license of my project and some tools I use within it).

Maybe this is kind of offtopic, but wanted to share it.

Most Open Source developers DO NOT get paid

[hacker]

I personally reject the assertion that marketing slides like this make to investors (likely VA/OSDN investors in this case) that imply that Open Source developers are getting paid to do more than half of their work (slide 12,22, 23, 26 , and others). I would argue that 90% or more of Open Source work done by developers that are not working on "Company Products", is unpaid.

I spent 18 months at an Open Source company, and never spent a single hour during company time in 18 months working on anything Open Source, including my own Open Source projects. I was certainly "expected" to put in 10+ hour days on the weekends though, without any additional compensation "for the good of the company".

Many Open Source developers are unemployed right now and still looking for work (259 days and counting for myself), and still contributing 100% of their time to their projects, while the "industry" at large continues to fire and lay off more and more qualified developers in the interest of "quarterly revenues". Trust me, nobody is getting more than half of their income from any company for working on projects that are given away gratis as the above slides lead you to believe.

I also reject the assertion that Sourceforge is leading the way in this regard. Sourceforge has been drifting for quite some time, and thousands of developers are leaving Sourceforge for want of better services every week. You don't see that on the surveys though, do you?

What still surprises me

[i0lanthe]

... even though it is not a novel finding, is "98% male". This is more skewed than CS graduate school, for pete's sake. Do women never have a need to write code (or tweak/fix someone else's open source code) in their spare time? Or are they just less likely to release it for others to use? (or less likely to answer surveys about it afterwards, maybe? :)

Why?