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.

50%?

Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."

As best I can tell 50% never bother to finish the project. It's like a bad sci-fi novel "and......a monster eats everyone..the end"

wtf?

Most of the source forge hosted projects I've seen are still in the "planning" stage, have no files, and 0% activity.

Open Source.

Two things

1.) This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

and 2.) What were the other options????

• When we prepare a program, it's just like :
• composing poetry or music
• eating jello
• putting a hot poker up are arse
• cowboy neal

Must be lots of poets out there

From the article:

Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."

So, at least 50% of the respondents are also poets or composers..? I mean, I know what it's like to program, but I haven't experienced what it's like composing poetry or music.

With a 25 hour day

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

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."

The Art & Science of Programming

After interacting with many programmers I fined that there are generally two different categories of programmers:

Artists - They may not be great at math, they may not be great at science, but when it comes to programming they have an intuitive nature about it - often making unique or "insightful" code. not necessarily the easiest to read... This would be the 50% that said that programming was like writing poetry.

Scientists - These are the sort that rely moreso on science and math. They tend to be slightly less intuitive in the code, but it is sometimes made up for by readability and correctness.

Of course, most programmers are a combination of the two, with one aspect slightly more dominant than the other.

I've found that I tend more towards the artist...

Ah... I thougt it was just me

"When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."

I thougt it was just me. I love to use my cppToMp3 converter and listen to my codefiles.

No more deadlines

They said that they expect an open source project leader to create the initial code base, integrate submissions, open minds to options, and provide motivation, but not to determine or delegate tasks, recruit contributors, or manage timing.

I.e. do the unglamerous bits and leave others to cherry-pick. And never impose deadlines on the team members.

I think most programmers would want this of their managers, whether they are working on open source or not!

GET A LIFE!

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!

# 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

Stick it to the competition....

How many people work on open source just to pull the rug out from under the competition?

Sure Company A's product is nice. But ours can do everything theirs can, and did we mention that it is free. It is our way of saying thank you to our clients (and slapping the competition for infringing on part of our market).

my cost

is lack of sex, especially when my wife wants to know why I'm "playing on the computer"!

The stats are most interesting

The comparison of Paid programmers Versus the Free-prgrammers is quite interesting ... some items are flip floped.. while the basic premise is there...

Code should be free, and widely available..

it's kinda funny how the people actually creating believe it's stupid to lock something up so nobody can learn from it, yet those with zero crative talent (management) believe that it's a massive money-maker and must be protected better than fort-knox.

Has anyone ever found a rea-solid argument to keep sourceocde locked up and a super secret? other than lining your own pockets?

Well, they're not *quite* the same

Speaking as someone who has spent significant amounts of time both composing music and writing programs, I can say that they aren't quite the same. Writing music can be much more carthartic [m-w.com] (meanings 2) then programming. Composing music, at least the way I did it with a synth so you can hear it right away, can be emotionally freeing in a way that programming can't be.

Flip side, programming can be more exciting, in that it's easier to do something that nobody's done before or better then anybody's done before, with the right tools. Frankly, all the music YOU'LL ever write has basically been written; after hundreds of years of musical development, it's damned hard to find anything new to call your own. (It's not impossible, but very, very, very hard.)

The similarities are otherwise quite significant. With both, you do better and more work when you're "in the zone". There are some days where you just can't get anything done (interestingly, the overlap is not 100%; some days I could write music and not program, and vice versa). There's a lot of freedom, constrained by logic in both. (Whatever you may think, no music anyone will ever want to listen to is completely free of internal logic and consistency, and you violate those rules that we all know, even if we can't articulate them, at your own peril, just as with programming style.)

anyone program like me?

I program for fun, and I sell a little shareware application. I dont work for a software company or anything... Sometimes I'll have an idea for a program and I'll start programming. I program as much as I can, I get tons of work done, ideas keep flowing. Then I lose interest and can't program for a few months, no ideas come, and I just feel to lazy to bother. Programmers block I guess. I'm in one now, I haven't programmed anything since May or June.

I love programming

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

Very concise survey analysis

I think the results were analyzed very well. I particularly like the way they took the results and separated respondents into categories by motivations and contribution status: "Professionals" (paid for contribution, and do it for the work functionality), "Hobbyists" (completely non work-functionality), "Learning and Intellect" (motivation is intellectual stimulation), and "Community Believers" (believe that code should be open, and feel obligated to use).

Another interesting result for me as an undergraduate was that while sleep is the biggest thing lost by contributing to SourceForge, not many respondents felt the same about academic performance--leading me to believe that even though so much work is put in as to lose sleep over it, it may actually benefit college grades--which is what I've been told all along. Extracurriculars don't necessarily hurt your academics, in fact they can enhance it by giving you something else to focus on and enjoy. All in all a good survey.

Poetry or Music?

As a musician and developer with equal interest in both I have a hard time looking at my code and seeing poetry or music. When I look at code I see pure logic. (Go figure) That's not to say that logic isn't freakin' cool, however.

OT: what's up with the ``?''?

What's with the stupid ``&093;'' character? How
did it creep into the posting, and got copied
and pasted into so many quotations?

-mi

Sourceforge

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.

Euphoric Programming...

Every programmer feels the same at some point, Some great project. As for the extra hour to work, it all depends on the Project.

They should have used their 4 groups, and broken down the results more clearly (Statiscal distortion?? NEVER!). It would have been interesting how many of the 25% who do it for WORK, would want to do more?

But there is something to be said for 4:38 AM, eating crusty pizze, and finding that one lonely pointer has been misreferencing all night.... Ahh, the good old days...

C# Programmers

From the article:

Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."

so atleast 50% of thos interviewed were C# programmers? ...someone had to say it...

Related Story

In a related story, at a M$ developer's convention last week, 60% said, "With one more hour in the day, I would rearrange my GUI [program]." 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant excuse of participation. Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's like building stuff with Legos."

Generation X phenomenon

This survey was very interesting, and I'd like to applaud the authors for taking the time to do it. However, I have some sort of bizarre genetic defect that causes me to get cranky whenever someone uses the phrase "Generation X", so I can't help but foam a bit about slide 21 on v0.73 of the slides on the OSDN site.

The slide is titled "Open Source is a Generation X phenomenon". Don't draw too many conclusions from this data - although most Free/Open Source programmers may be 21-38 years old now, I'm sure plenty of those larval hackers who are presently younger will join in the fun once they've got some more coding experience under their belts.

I don't think the whole hacking phenomenon will die out in 60 years. So, although the graph shows a peak, what I think we're witnessing is the beginning of a phenomenon that will continue indefinitely (or at least until debuggers are made illegal).

Oh, and I hate this whole "Generation foo" marketing thing.

- Tim

Programming is music, not art.

Firstly, I am a classical pianist, who dabbles in composition and studio production, and I was a computer science major.

It is extremly dangerous for programmers to consider what they do "an art". Programmers who use this reasoning generally consider themselves to be kin to painters. Only they can produce the image in the proper way (which is never true). Avoid this thinking! Programming *is* a creative process but it is much more like chamber music than it is painting.

In chamber music, musicians work together following a set of rules and guidelines to create music. They deviate slightly from the path, expressing their creativity, but not so much that they hinder other musicians from playing along. Their unique talent *contributes* to the complete music experience. Good creative ideas never hinder the ensemble. Programmers who consider what they do to be "art" tend to think nobody else is capable of altering their code, or contributing to it. Well some programming "divas" may succeed at the task, but in most projects this attitude won't stand. Besides at some level you are working with other people, even if it seems your not. Someone else wrote the compiler your using, and there is no doubt at some point you are refering to their work.

Learning to work as a programming group or community is key to success as a programmer. Programmers HATE classes where they have to work together because they suffer from bad coaches. I think much of this is due to the coaches being reformed divas.

Oh well i'm rambling and probably not making my point.

Rob

This is the finding that struck me

OPEN SOURCE TURNS ON HACKERS [osdn.com]

"This project compared to my most creative experience is:"
My most creative effort 13.9%
Equally as creative 49.5%
Somewhat less creative 28.4%
Much less creative 8.1%


So we have more than 50% saying that the work they do for fun, love, and recognition in their spare time is as good or better than the work they do on company time.

This line on its own should be a cause for serious investigation into current software project management theory.

Most Open Source developers DO NOT get paid

I personally reject the assertion that marketing slides like this make to investors (likely VA/OSDN investors in this case) that imply that Open Source developers are getting paid to do more than half of their work (slide 12 [osdn.com],22 [osdn.com], 23 [osdn.com], 26 [osdn.com] , and others). I would argue that 90% or more of Open Source work done by developers that are not working on "Company Products", is unpaid.

I spent 18 months at an Open Source [linuxcare.com] company, and never spent a single hour during company time in 18 months working on anything Open Source, including my own Open Source projects. I was certainly "expected" to put in 10+ hour days on the weekends though, without any additional compensation "for the good of the company".

Many Open Source developers are unemployed right now and still looking for work (259 days and counting for myself), and still contributing 100% of their time to their projects, while the "industry" at large continues to fire and lay off more and more qualified developers in the interest of "quarterly revenues". Trust me, nobody is getting more than half of their income from any company for working on projects that are given away gratis as the above slides lead you to believe.

I also reject the assertion that Sourceforge is leading the way in this regard. Sourceforge has been drifting [advogato.org] for quite some time, and thousands of developers are leaving Sourceforge for want of better services every week. You don't see that on the surveys though, do you?

I'll wager...

...that the 50% that
agreed that "When we prepare a program, it's just like composing poetry or music."

have NEVER composed music or poetry.

What still surprises me

... even though it is not a novel finding, is "98% male" [osdn.com]. This is more skewed than CS graduate school, for pete's sake. Do women never have a need to write code (or tweak/fix someone else's open source code) in their spare time? Or are they just less likely to release it for others to use? (or less likely to answer surveys about it afterwards, maybe? :)

Why?

The extra hour

60% said, 'With one more hour in the day, I would program.'

Maybe they could get this extra hour if they stopped reading Slashdot...

Re:Interesting

Dude, they are artists! They start with a blank vi session, much like and empty canvas or a blank LP. They might have a vague idea of what their end result will be, but the journey is always new and the finished product is seldom what was envisioned prior.

The creative juices flow, while the artist mixes his paint, the musician tunes his instruments, and the coder cracks his knuckles and sips Mountain Dew. Soon, the process begins, and art is created. A beautiful entity replaces the spaces of nothingness that previously existed, and the artist is sated and complete.

Now, at the end of the session, the coder releases his art under the GPL, allowing the world to see, touch, and modify the beauty that he created, while thge musician and artist rely on the concept of intellectual property to prevent the world from truly appreciating their work.

Re:HA!

The fact that my wrist is larger than your biceps should alert you to the fact that

E) You wank all day long.

Snik snik. Now go mop the floor by the fryer.

Re:poetry? Music?

I think "code choreographer" meets the goal of sounding "more faggy"