this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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I'm fine with this trend.
Servers aren't free and engineers aren't cheap. Online products need to make money in our world.
If you're not paying them they need something to sell to someone else.
Problem is that some companies double dip. Pay for the service and have your data sold.
You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.
Servers aren't free but it's damn cheap if you don't bloat up your backend
And the way you don't bloat your backend?
Expensive engineers
How expensive do we have to be for them to actually listen to us for a change? Or do you mean "expensive consultants?"
Well yeah this presupposes that management knows what the fuck they're doing.
Which is vanishingly rare. It happens sometimes though. I worked at a small 12 man shop that had an engineer CEO who valued doing things right. Very refreshing.
Throwing more bodies at a situation does NOT solve the situation faster or more efficiently; seriously, this shit is the most remedial, 101-level shit in pretty much any field where man-hours are a measuring metric.
That's probably why he wrote "expensive" and not "more".
It's almost like he pluralized something implying "go get more". I'm not playing semantic gymnastics with you tech"bro" ballbags this morning
Idk I immediately understood what he meant, no need to be so rude about it
Probably having a bad day and is angry at something else, but lashing out online. Happens all the time.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Expensive engineers is a category dipshit.
You add an S to a noun in English to show it's a category or grouping instead of a specific individual.
Learn to fucking read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_category
That's not what I said or even remotely implied.
If you want a good back end that isn't bloated you can't use cheap contractors or junior engineers - you need someone who knows what they're doing.
It's a fight I'm constantly fighting at work. They finally dropped all the super cheap contractors that were trying to hard code a list of 20 identical entries that differed only by a single field. The contractors who thought the peak of architectural design was decomposition of any method more than 5 lines long into confusingly named functions that had an additional 10 layers of decomposition to them. The cheap contractors who thought that documentation was a waste of time and that the code was "self documenting".
These contractors weren't paid to care - I don't blame them for phoning it in. But if you want a system to work well and be cheap to run you pay your engineers well or inspire such devotion that FOSS is possible.
But the fact is the overwhelming majority of large, optimized and successful FOSS is funded by megacorps
Unfortunately, there are expensive engineers who think the same 😦 I don't know how they pass technical interviews or probationary periods.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Definitely - hiring isn't easy.
But you'll never get value for money from engineers who don't care, and you have a 0% chance of a cheap contractor caring.
Again - I don't blame them. They shouldn't care. The company clearly doesn't respect them.
But it's a false economy.
True. Some people aren't paid enough to care 👍
Is that a typo or a term I don't know?
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Not a typo - a false economy is a decision that saves money in the short term but wastes more than it saves in the long term.
Thank you, learned something new!
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
:::
average day on feddit 🙄
Reading comprehension: you lack it.
Either you get:
Either way, it's expensive.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0Seriously, you can't have nine pregnant women and expect one baby in one month.
Or it's a FOSS solution.
Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.
Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.
I certainly don't say any of this in defense of capitalism, but "free" is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn't exist.
Life isn't a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.
Sure, there are costs involved, but that's true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren't like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?
Doing something because you want to is vastly different from expecting everything to be free.
Hi, software engineer here. FOSS is a blessing and only fucking morons push against it.
Yes, developers need to be compensated, but it IS NOT ethical, correct, or even basically good to do that by being a predator towards your customers.
That's the wrong kind of free
this post glows
Yeah, lemmy is insanely illogical on this topic. Services cost money to run, and the average user is not going to self host anytime in the foreseeable future. I have yet to hear anybody offer a vision of how things might reasonably work without ads OR subscriptions.
The argument as far as I can tell is "FOSS means I don't have to pay anything because it doesn't cost anything! If they ask for donations they don't mean me"
Not a single one of them have a monthly contribution to their instance though. Guaran-fucking-tee it.
For our instance, the users have in fact donated and keep us running. I'm not sure why you'd think users are unwilling to donate.
Because I've regularly got in arguments with people who refuse to donate.
The ratio of leachers to seeders in torrents is a similar issue - and seeding is practically free.
Asking $12/yr for software seems like pulling teeth to some.
That may be your problem. We don't ask for anything specific. We simply make a post with how much the service costs and how much users have donated. Users are smart and can take things from there.
I'm not running an instance I'm talking about generalities not specifics.
Between this and the sheer amount of pro piracy, i'm honestly convinced people on Lemmy are cheap fucks.
I can understand not having anything and not wanting to pay. I get it.
But don't act like it's free just because you can't afford it.
They can just fuck off