If I wash your car, will you hack open-source for me?
category: offtopic [glöplog]
Quote:
I only stack firewood couple times a year, and it's a refreshing change of pace from sitting next to a computer.. =) ... One item on your list is on a completely different category than the rest - "repair your house". Those things are generally in the scale of 10kEur/a pop in Finland
sol- I also find stacking a refreshing change from coding n the summer, but the other way around in January :)
Good point about the scale - my contractor's hourly rate would also hire a programmer, even if not a super-experienced one.
Your comment reminds me of Pirsig's point in Zen that a five-cent screw is worth $5000 as soon as it strips out and prevents you from repairing a $5000 motorcycle. My days are so packed I look at any hour as being worth my hourly charge rate at work, even if the task being done is nowhere near that on the open market.
No - similar reasons to smash. If I'm doing highly skilled work, best case I'm trading an hour of chores for an hour of code - but this is ignoring the years I've spent learning and practicing those skills. This is why coding tends to have higher monetary value than car washing, a shitload more work is involved even if both tasks take 1 hour :) So I definitely wouldn't trade 1 hour of code for 1 hour of chores.
With that in mind, it takes a lot of car washing to pay for a new feature in some app. Which doesn't seem exactly fair to the person doing the car washing - asking somebody to wash my car every week and cut my lawn every other week for a year in return for a few hours work would make me feel pretty shitty about the deal.
More realistic solution: I code for money, and pay people to wash the car / mow the lawn (or just do it myself since it's exercise and fresh air), and work on open source stuff if I feel it's worthwhile.
With that in mind, it takes a lot of car washing to pay for a new feature in some app. Which doesn't seem exactly fair to the person doing the car washing - asking somebody to wash my car every week and cut my lawn every other week for a year in return for a few hours work would make me feel pretty shitty about the deal.
More realistic solution: I code for money, and pay people to wash the car / mow the lawn (or just do it myself since it's exercise and fresh air), and work on open source stuff if I feel it's worthwhile.
