I’ve gained wisdom from commercial proprietary challenges since 2012 and switched entirely to my personal projects. Free and Open Source Software is my passion, I believe it’s the shortest way to healthier products for society.

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FAQ

What’s wrong with traditional businesses?

Usually they can’t or aren’t willing to express certain relatively high ethical values. Stuff that goes beyond things like mere profit generation/high quality products/etc.

One of the core values I’m pursuing is just distraction minimization: I don’t want to trap users’ attention in my products; they deserve healthier life!

More explanations! 🤯

Why is it so hard to properly express
just this value alone in commercial products?

I perceive the three typical career paths the following way:

1. Work for traditional company (or companies) as a contractor (or coworker)

  • Pros:
    • 👍 possibility to practice SE
      • best for initial gaining of SE experience
    • 👍 possibility to choose organization maturity
      • in a depressing range 🫤
    • 👍 typically no sustainability fuss at all
  • Cons:
    • 🤦‍♂️ (almost) no control over high-level decisions
      • company will likely do some unethical things for various legitimate reasons

2. Work on Personal Projects

  • Pros:
    • 👍 best for those who already experienced enough in SE
    • 👍 full decisions control
      • possibility to express unrestricted high ethical values from the very beginning
      • innovations freedom
  • Cons:
    • 💀 extremely hard sustainability

3. Open a traditional company

  • Pros:
    • 👍 some decisions control
      • restricted to democratic decisions across (co-)founders
      • but some of the co-founders might often turn out to be overgrown psychopathic infants 💀
        • what kind of decisions such company will be making in this case?
  • Cons:
    • 🤦‍♂️ too much management, hard to perform actual SE as founder
    • 🤦‍♂️ often very hard sustainability
    • 💀 barbarian survival values for unknown period of time
      • company rarely matures up to advanced enough stages of development, where high enough ethical values become adequate to express (without damaging company sustainability).

Few examples of barbarism in typical commercial products:

  1. Intentional (usually survival) manipulative techniques:
    • intrusive advertising and notifications
      • “We’ve got something else for you!” when user is about to close a page
      • sudden loud commercials while you’re listening to your silent relaxing meditative music
    • sudden appearance of unwanted button in the position you were about to click
    • replacement of normal support service with a retarded chat bot, that gives only a limited number of useless feedback options
  2. Hardcore intentional manipulative techniques, which suspiciously remind scam techniques which exist as something legal due to poor regulations:
    • unannounced enabling of useless paid services
    • overcomplicated UIs which intentionally lead to mistakes
    • not providing purchased service at all with absurd excuse.

If I’d like to start a traditional company, then even as an ethical enough founder, I would most likely run into choices between:

  • implementing similar barbarian stuff
  • or closing entire organization, since it won’t survive otherwise.

Sustainable organizations
slowly grow through stages of development

They often stuck in endless survival nightmare. Some of them run into conflicts between co-founders, which may lead to corrupting the core values of organization in various ways or, ironically, even abandoning core leaders!

There’s a huge chance to never express high ethical values at all as an organization, despite long and painful efforts to grow it.

Ignorance

Organizations naturally delegate less important things to teams which gladly copy-paste terrible damaging ideas, due to various convincing excuses: because they are cheaper to copy, they are implemented by competitors, etc.

  • scrolljacking
  • useless over-detailed documentation, which quickly becomes obsolete
  • sudden non-disableable notifications/tooltips/tutorials/announcements of features
  • useless CAPTCHAs, which bury your precious flow state
    • there’s absolutely no reason to distinguish bots from humans anymore
    • it’s ironical that companies like OpenAI/Google/etc. are wasting their time improving bot detection
      • they could even monetize bots traffic, by turning bots into a crypto mining farm distributed browser-based ML inference engine, or whatever ecological enough, both to human mentality and to the business
  • overcomplicate every single native GUI application by turning it into another web browser
    • it’s a fractal of issues; one of them is that such software inevitably becomes buggy (and usually laggy)
      • sometimes to the point, where it becomes impossible to use without loss of attention and constant annoyance
  • offline anti-patterns, like a notification bell in your microwave that decreases quality of your neighbors’ sleep
    • reminds me an another popular (but orthogonal) anti-pattern: cool light (produced by conditioner or whatever) that decreases quality of your sleep.

So why do I choose making personal projects, as individual?

Due to possibility to start without all this barbarism from the very beginning.

The possibility itself is so valuable to me that I no longer find traditional commercial organizations attractive to me.

Why won’t you combine work on less risky projects and on your own projects as well?

I’ve already done an honest series of experiments balancing work for a really awesome company vs my personal projects.

I stopped after decreasing time allocation of work for a company to 60% because this just doesn’t work for me at all.

I’ve never managed to focus on my project when I work on other project as well. This leads to mediocracy everywhere and constant burnout, which I’m still recovering from. 🧘‍♂️