News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: I lost my job by iLemming on Thursday April 02, 2020 @05:04PM (#22763825)
Thank you for your support and for taking the time to write a lengthy comment. It seems my original comment looks like I'm complaining about my situation - that wasn't my intent. I wasn't trying to win sympathy or start a controversial thread to get fake gold or virtual likes; it isn't Reddit, Twitter, or Instagram. I just wanted to point out that the market dried up and even industries such as ours (where software engineers are usually in demand) suffering greatly from the economic downturn.

> Open-source contributions, side projects, whatever you can do to further demonstrate your value to prospective future employers

That's what I was talking about. Why can't we all as a community figure out some platform where we can help those developers who [temporarily] lost their jobs? We all use lots of open-source tools without paying a dime. Wouldn't it be great to have a platform where they can still contribute to open-source projects during a transitional period? Platforms like Patreon and Github Sponsors are aimed to help authors, but not contributors.

That was the whole point of my comment. I wasn't asking for an advice and certainly wasn't ready for people telling me how incredibly lucky I am.

Re:Ask HN: I lost my job by yellowapple on Thursday April 02, 2020 @11:19PM (#22766053)
> Wouldn't it be great to have a platform where they can still contribute to open-source projects during a transitional period?

Indeed it would. Things like Patreon are still usable even if you're "just" a contributor, but it'd be nice if there was one of these patron platforms that better showcased open-source contributions. GitHub Sponsors is a step in the right direction, but there's still a waitlist to be eligible for sponsorships after, what, a year?

Of course, in all likelihood, if jobs are drying up then so will such sponsorships, be it on existing platforms or entirely new ones.