Ask HN: How to be altruistic while working full-time?

7 points by m4rcadam 12 years ago | 2 comments

I'm a full-time software developer at a company based in Boston, and most of the work that I do is backend (python/mongo/data) and is really tailored to the applications we're currently developing

I'd really like to contribute to open source projects but I feel like i never have the time to, or that If I were to contribute I would be spending less time doing work and more time focusing on the projects I'm contributing to. You would say that I should write better code and release code as packages or blueprints, but most of the code is proprietary, we're still validating our products, and if I were to do that I would have to spend a lot more time to add more functionality that really isn't used in my application, and iterations would generally take longer.

My question is this: how do you give yourself time to work on open source projects? do you feel like contributing to open source is better (in some sense) than contributing to the growth of your own company? or how do you make contributions/build open source projects as part of your job?

taprun 12 years ago |

It sounds like you are trying to optimize for two goals:

1) Contribute to open source 2) Limit the amount of time you spend on tasks that don't contribute to your company

The solution seems simple enough. Examine the open source tools that you use to build your company. When you find problems, issues or inefficiencies in those tools, fix them. This will hopefully improve the tools and speed up your work on your company at the same time.

Alternatively, give the tools free press in your Twitter/Facebook/blog/whatever communications and hopefully you'll encourage someone else to contribute instead. As an added bonus, such communications may help spread word of your company.

thejteam 12 years ago |

Unless you own the company, the work you do outside of work should contribute to YOUR growth, not the company's. Are you going to be learning something new and interesting? Building a portfolio to get your next job? Not sure what the answer should be in your situation, just something to think about.