andrewducker | (Reply)

From:

The 501 manifesto reveals an interesting difference of attitude between them and me, in that it lists 'contribute to open source projects' as an aspect of 'allowing your employment to penetrate deeply into your personal life'. I would absolutely disagree: I've always considered myself to be a 'leave on the dot of 5:30' type employee and pushed back against corporate encroachments on my off-time (not just overwork culture but even company social events – I want to be socialising with people I chose, not people HR chose), and yet I'm also a fervent free-software person, and for me the two statements are not contradictory at all.

Partly it's that in my case, it's difficult to argue that my free software activities are some kind of unwholesome overspill from my job, since I was doing them before I even had a job, and when I started applying for jobs one of my major criteria for choosing between them was whether any given job would afford me the time and energy (not to mention freedom from overzealous copyright land-grabs in the contract) to carry on with free-software stuff.

But mostly, I think, there's a fundamental difference of viewpoint in that they're dividing the space of human activity into Software Engineering (work) and Everything Else (personal life). Whereas I divide it into Doing Stuff That Matters To My Employer (work) versus Doing Stuff That Matters To Me (personal life), and if some things in the latter category also happen to be software engineering then that makes them no less me-stuff rather than work-stuff.