>But, they often still pay far better than just about any other career you can do.
Yep, that's completely true.
>I'm a fairly unremarkable developer who works for a no-name tech company, but still make twice as much as my friends my age who are in law or accounting, even finance.
Yep.
>Only ones who even come close are in non-white collar jobs with unions and access to lots of overtime hours that they pick up. Their base pay isn't even close.
Yep. I would say that SWEs have even better working conditions than any union I have heard of.
Recommended a scheme to shield OSS developers from liability. I am not a lawyer, so it looked a bit overly cautious to me, but it seems that was a good idea.
So do you mean that limited liability clauses essentially void? This looks really absurd. How could we develop and distribute any software in such a context?
We have been working on a VS Code extension (link in my profile), which released some time ago. I had a thought that may be we should stick with the approach used by most of the ecosystem, when license is linked from the extension page. However, we decided to show accept/reject dialog. I am glad that we did it this way.
I have seen a large number of products (from SaaS to desktop apps) which don't properly ask for license acceptance to reduce sign up friction. They might be affected in the same way (I am not a lawyer).
Almost all players in this field publish their work. If need arises we will be able to reproduce them, but only large company will be able to run the models cost efficiently, and there're a lot of scale effects here.
This is very good news for us as consumers. We don't want anyone of the players to dominate this field, and we want the service to be as cheap as possible, ideally free.
It's very useful for enterprises to have one solution like github. Github isn't the best in every fields, but overall it's the best offer (they have git hosting, continuous integration, bug tracking, discussion forums, hosted dev environment, and now code search). It reminds me of a bundling strategy used in MS Office.