> Being employed as a full-time maintainer by a big company pays better but is not much healthier, both organizationally and individually. Executives and promotion committees start asking "what is it that we pay you for exactly?", and suddenly you're spending more and more time proving your work is important, and less and less time doing it. The workload increases as the project grows, but the team struggles to get more resources, no one gets promoted, and people burn out and leave or change roles. I've seen this play out across multiple companies and ecosystems, over and over.
If I can be cynical, they I'd say that it's quite clever strategy of Google to get people who actually care about the product and who can bring meaningful contributions, to work for free.
> I've seen this play out across multiple companies and ecosystems, over and over.
I don’t see what’s Google specific about any of this? Certainly one can argue that it’s a massive global conspiracy coordinated across the multiple companies alluded to…
https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/
> Being employed as a full-time maintainer by a big company pays better but is not much healthier, both organizationally and individually. Executives and promotion committees start asking "what is it that we pay you for exactly?", and suddenly you're spending more and more time proving your work is important, and less and less time doing it. The workload increases as the project grows, but the team struggles to get more resources, no one gets promoted, and people burn out and leave or change roles. I've seen this play out across multiple companies and ecosystems, over and over.