On 9/23/2010 10:37 AM, Grant Ingersoll wrote: > > At any rate, my motivation for asking is that I'm writing an article on some > thoughts in this area spurred by something a client told me (at a very old, > established company, mind you) about why they wanted to get the word out that > they were using open source: they felt it would help them attract and retain > developers b/c they would be more satisfied in their jobs b/c they got to > work on innovative open source technologies.
I'd actually think that your client is on the mark, and that the mythology of working on open source is stronger than the actual variance, but where there is perception, there is benefit to advertising their participation in open source for prospective candidates. Many of the real satisfaction questions to an engineer have more to do with how dirty they get their hands into code vs. architecture vs. management, what their working environment is like, relationships to peers and mgmt, and similar factors. Keep in mind that some engineers are more attracted to sub-sub-sub-basement top-secret work and the thought of having to participate in an open and public environment may be terrifying, or simply uninteresting to them. If you really were to sample developers, I would think that how much using open source also plays into satisfaction. Simply being able to dig into the flaws or implementation details in my support libraries was always the biggest indicator of my job satisfaction, irrespective of whether I contributed back or not. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: community-unsubscr...@apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: community-h...@apache.org
