4 ms·

The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) was that listing your developers like that was a good way to get them poached by other companies. Cr

by 13of40 5y ago

The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) was that listing your developers like that was a good way to get them poached by other companies. Crediting people by name is always a bit of a minefield anyway. Do test engineers and SRE get included? Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his name come first or do you do it alphabetically? Etc.

phtrivier 5y ago
> The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) was that listing your developers like that was a good way to get them poached by other companies. I have to doubt the argument here. I was there 20 years ago, and the companies that wanted to recruit would just get the listing of all CS students for that year from university notebooks, and called them in a row. Why didn't MS forbid employees from being in their phone books or university facebooks ? > Do test engineers and SRE get included? Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in the credits.) SREs is a much more interesting question ; since it's more of a "person keeping the lights on" thing than, "person who built the thing." Then again, whose business collapses if they get their name written somewhere ? So SAAS credits would be a "dynamic" thing, in a "credits" page that gets updated every so often. Pretty much like the credits of this week episode of any TV show is just every so slighly different that the previous weeks's one. > Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his name come first or do you do it alphabetically Alphabetically. Yes. And if you really want to overthink it: alphabetically, organised by team / department / components / whatever, with the name of the "Head xxx" or "Xxx lead" first. Basically, the same way you publish the org chart of some levels of your company. Since Conway's law is the only law, your org charts and your products probably have the same structure anyway. Do companies ask people to hide the fact that they are "deputy-head-lead of quality synergies" on linkedin, in case they are poached ?
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  > Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in the credits.) No particular deep knowledge here, but: my impression is this was a long and painful push by various unions and agents, with “top billing” becoming an actual thing to be negotiated as part of an actor’s contract, etc. Even having the end credits at all seems to be a workaround for accomodating the enormous number of people who insist on being credited: movies from the 30s seem to be perfectly content to just list the production company, the stars, and maybe the director at the start. Of course, it takes at most a couple generations of professionals to shift from “this is a thing won through hard negotiations” to “this is a thing that everybody is entitled to by common morality”, but my point is it didn’t (appear to) start that way, it had to be squeezed out from the execs over years. (Of course movies also don’t need maintenance or refactoring, at least not in the sense of requiring other actors and camera crews to come in.)
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    It was definitely a thing unions fought for - a big thing actually. This is the reason why there are so many people missing on movie credits who worked on the VFX - there is no VFX union (there was a huge scheme by some very big name assholes back in the day to block it - and a huge court settlement). Watch any major Marvel or other VFX heavy film and some of the studios will get full credits for their teams while other smaller ones will just list the studio name, the VFX Supervisor (top of the chain) and a few other people. There are tons and tons missing.
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
A similar policy with a similar motivation was allegedly a major factor in the commonly-cited "first easter egg" in Adventure for the Atari 2600, as well as the founding of Activision.

by 13of40 5y ago

phtrivier 5y ago

> The explanation I heard for it (at Microsoft 20 years ago) was that listing your developers like that was a good way to get them poached by other companies. I have to doubt the argument here. I was there 20 years ago, and the companies that wanted to recruit would just get the listing of all CS students for that year from university notebooks, and called them in a row. Why didn't MS forbid employees from being in their phone books or university facebooks ? > Do test engineers and SRE get included? Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in the credits.) SREs is a much more interesting question ; since it's more of a "person keeping the lights on" thing than, "person who built the thing." Then again, whose business collapses if they get their name written somewhere ? So SAAS credits would be a "dynamic" thing, in a "credits" page that gets updated every so often. Pretty much like the credits of this week episode of any TV show is just every so slighly different that the previous weeks's one. > Everyone knows Jim is the alpha dev, so does his name come first or do you do it alphabetically Alphabetically. Yes. And if you really want to overthink it: alphabetically, organised by team / department / components / whatever, with the name of the "Head xxx" or "Xxx lead" first. Basically, the same way you publish the org chart of some levels of your company. Since Conway's law is the only law, your org charts and your products probably have the same structure anyway. Do companies ask people to hide the fact that they are "deputy-head-lead of quality synergies" on linkedin, in case they are poached ?

mananaysiempre 5y ago
> Test engineers of a "shipped" product should obvioulsy get credited, yet. (I mean, movie credits have the name of cattering people ! You worked on it ? You get your name in the credits.) No particular deep knowledge here, but: my impression is this was a long and painful push by various unions and agents, with “top billing” becoming an actual thing to be negotiated as part of an actor’s contract, etc. Even having the end credits at all seems to be a workaround for accomodating the enormous number of people who insist on being credited: movies from the 30s seem to be perfectly content to just list the production company, the stars, and maybe the director at the start. Of course, it takes at most a couple generations of professionals to shift from “this is a thing won through hard negotiations” to “this is a thing that everybody is entitled to by common morality”, but my point is it didn’t (appear to) start that way, it had to be squeezed out from the execs over years. (Of course movies also don’t need maintenance or refactoring, at least not in the sense of requiring other actors and camera crews to come in.)
- Melatonic 5y ago
  It was definitely a thing unions fought for - a big thing actually. This is the reason why there are so many people missing on movie credits who worked on the VFX - there is no VFX union (there was a huge scheme by some very big name assholes back in the day to block it - and a huge court settlement). Watch any major Marvel or other VFX heavy film and some of the studios will get full credits for their teams while other smaller ones will just list the studio name, the VFX Supervisor (top of the chain) and a few other people. There are tons and tons missing.

0xcde4c3db 5y ago

A similar policy with a similar motivation was allegedly a major factor in the commonly-cited "first easter egg" in Adventure for the Atari 2600, as well as the founding of Activision.