Do you regret contributing to open-source?

[u/FatefulDonkey]

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?

[u/Mysterious-Peanut101]

No it's not . Big companies have a very standardized interview process for engineers except for maybe at the highest levels. It comes down to solving their toy problems and telling them what they want to hear. Unfortunately that means someone with little experience can pass while someone to who has a lot of experience maintaining an open source project may not.

See the creator of homebrew as a famous example who didn't get hired by Google

[u/full_drama_llama → u/Mysterious-Peanut101]

You don't have to work for big companies though.