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

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.