Lack of time? Come on that's just a really lame excuse. It's hard but even with full school, full time work, part time startup, and two kids it's not that hard to find two three hours a week to do some os dev.
Lack of time? Come on that's just a really lame excuse. It's hard but even with full school, full time work, part time startup, and two kids it's not that hard to find two three hours a week to do some os dev.
When it comes to teaching yourself to code, two to three hours per week is lame, what you learnt in one week is likely to have been forgotten by the next.
So yes, let's not do anything and blame stuff on some lame stuff like lack of time.
Hmm, no... let's not do anything until we can rationalise the problem. On average I spend around four to five hours a day teaching myself programming, that amount of time is the main reason I can learn it effectively. Along with the commitment of two part time jobs (one of them being voluntary), an accountancy course, searching for new jobs and the fact that I can't afford a car, I get about 4 - 5 hours sleep per day. No, that ain't no balance. If I had children to look after, I doubt I would be able to do it.
So you admit that somehow you're able to find few hours a day volunteer. While you may not have enough time to contribute to os projects at this moment, it's simply because you have different priorities,and prefer to spend that time doing other activities. "Lack of time" excuse is simply that - an excuse. Instead of saying "I lack time to contribute to do X", people should be saying - "I want to spend my time doing Y instead of X".
We all have a limited amount of time to spend on our hobbies, work and the family. We will never have enough time to do all that we would like to do - that is obvious..
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So you admit that somehow you're able to find few hours a day volunteer. This is a necessity, otherwise a potential employer will assume I'm lazy and apathetic.
While you may not have enough time to contribute to os projects at this moment, it's simply because you have different priorities,and prefer to spend that time doing other activities. It's not the time I lack, it is the expertise, which should improve with more practise. Preferences are different from priorities, my preference would be to write C code (and other languages) for most of the day. My priorities are to get a full time minimum wage job, since that is basically a realistic goal for me. One of the reasons I am doing an accountancy course is that I couldn't get sufficient funding for a course in computing, and this is because I cannot get a full time minimum wage job to pay for said computing course. Sound familiar? In CS this is related to bootstrapping.
Also, my paid job is working as a tree surgeon. One of the most dangerous jobs in the UK, as well as back breaking. I'm amazed I have enough energy to code when I get home.
Sure, but many of us are lazy and don't have the motivation to work so much. The thing is, if you have two populations with roughly the same amount of lazy people, but one has on average more free time, it's more likely that it'll produce an higher volume of contributions to FOSS projects.
Yes, I totally agree, but I'm sure you can agree that it's still just a matter of deciding what you want to do with your free time. If you decide that the free time you have is better spend watching Braking Bad or playing EVE, you should not use "lack of time" excuse for any other activity. It's all about priorities.
The fact that you can still squeeze in two-three hours a week to do some os dev is a really lame excuse for working that hard; there is more to life than work.
And there are those with more time obligations than what you've listed on top of struggling to make ends meet. Not everyone, granted -- and for some, lack of time will
indeed be a lame excuse -- but it sounds like you're generalizing to everyone.
Lack of time is a lame excuse. Always. I often use it, but I'm not lying to myself, blaming stuff on something else. It's just an excuse.
There is 24 hours in a day. If you sleep for 8 hours like I do, you still have time for 8 hours of work, and spend 3 hours with your kids, you still have 5 hours to do something productive. Even if you waste 3 hours on stuff like eating, commuting or watching television you still have 2 hours to do something productive.. And we should not forget about the weekend and holidays where you have eight hours that are usually spend working, freed up.
And working hard? I'm lazy and I hate working hard, that's why I'm a soft dev. :)
So "only" one full time job with no overtime... but you've already said yourself you have more than that, with school and the startup?
> Even if you waste 3 hours on stuff like eating, commuting
I've had commutes which eat up more time than that on their own on a good day! And heck, I have a coworker who has a longer commute now than mine was!
Lets try the math again: Two full time jobs trying to make ends meet. I hear this is a thing that happens sometimes. Even the stereotypical easy mode "well off white man" runs into this sometimes with mandatory 80+ hour work week crunches at his programming job and is foolish enough to go along with it.
8 hours of sleep + 8 hours of job 1 + 8 hours of job 2 (or mandatory overtime.) We've already used up all 24 hours of every weekday before getting into commutes, eating, or grocery shopping! There's only the 32 hours of the weekend left (2x(24-8))
Let's give this unfortunate person a commute only as long as that coworker of mine... this seems generous considering my coworker only commutes to one job. ~20 hours / week. 12 hours remaining (32-20.)
They prepare and scarf down all three meals a day in 20 minutes each (I would choke on my food frequently at those speeds.) 5 hours remaining (12 - 7x3/3.) Grocery shopping takes me about an hour a week without clipping coupons or looking for deals: 4 hours. 9 minutes to shower, brush teeth, and use the restroom a day: 3 hours left.
Lets be generous and assume they don't have to fill up the tank (they take the bus?), pay the bills (they're all autopaid?), take out the trash, do the laundry, or take care of a single other chore. Their business is finally out of the way!
They have 3 hours left out of their entire week, including weekends, to spend with their friends, family, or FOSS before they need to start sacrificing sleep. If this person says they lack the time to work on FOSS, is that a lame excuse?
