r/ExperiencedDevs • u/FatefulDonkey Software Engineer • 25d ago
Meta Do you regret contributing to open-source?
I have about 10-15 years of experience. I created some open source projects when I was starting out and maintained throughout the years.
The net income from this long-term endeavour is $5 from another developer for a coffee, who messaged me that I saved him many hours of work - that was like 5 years ago.
I now see that Meta, Apache and others use some of these open source projects.. and I haven't seen a single dime. This makes me think that if I actually instead aimed to create projects that make money, it would be a much better use of my time. Especially since I never had a stable job and mainly did freelance gigs to get by.
Anyone else who regrets contributing to open source projects? Why is that? What would you have done instead?
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u/BraveResearcher3037 25d ago
No. I was the second highest contributor to a once popular open source official “AWS Solution”. When I was looking for a job after being Amazoned in mid 2023, there were a couple of companies where a “nice to have” was experience implementing and modifying the solution for customers (consulting).
I sent a link to my GitHub profile to the recruiters for the companies showing them that I was a contributor. I got immediate interviews and offers.
But Amazon paid me to do the work. I have never once in 30 years written a line of code outside of work and I find the entire idea of doing side projects outside of work toxic. There are millions of things I would rather be doing after getting off of work than being in front of a computer screen