9 ms·

Work for yourself, not for your employer. Your employer will fire you the second it is profitable for them, that's how it is. It doesn't mean that you have to

• rat9988 2y ago
  >I really don't get why developers sometimes go out of their way to help their employer keep their code proprietary I don't do it because I am helpful, but because I'm paid to do so.
  • palata 2y ago
    You're paid to produce code, not to fight against open sourcing it.
    • tiborsaas 2y ago
      Not really, code is a means to an end, we are paid to solve problems and sometimes it translates to writing or deleting code.
      • palata 2y ago
        You're being pedantic here, but missing the point. The parent implies that they "go out of their way to keep their employer's code proprietary" because they are paid for it. I was merely noting that they are not paid for that. They are paid to [solve problems] (which I expressed as "write code").
• pjc50 2y ago
  > As developers, IMHO you should always push for open sourcing as much as you can, ideally with a copyleft license and no CLA. Because it is beneficial for you personally: it means that you can reuse your code after you leave, and if you manage to make it copyleft and accept external contributions, it will force your employer to keep distributing the sources after you leave. How many people have had this work? Am I unusual in working at places that take an extremely restrictive attitude to their IP?
  • starbugs 2y ago
    > Am I unusual in working at places that take an extremely restrictive attitude to their IP? No.
  • phito 2y ago
    > How many people have had this work? Statistically, almost nobody.
  • swarnie 2y ago
    If you write something at work does anything realistically stop you retaining enough person documentation / snippets to fully or partially recreate it? My buddy Slim seems capable of it and has built up quite a portfolio of "ready to go" solutions for common problems over the years.
    • pjc50 2y ago
      https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/05/19/yahoo-lawsuit-alleges-employee-stole-trade-secrets-upon-receiving-trade-desk-job https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/05/19/yahoo-lawsuit-allege... It's a matter of degree, obviously, but every time you do this it's likely to count as IP infringement. Generic libraries? Probably nobody will ever notice or care. But if they do, it could be expensive for you.
      • Arch-TK 2y ago
        It may be expensive, but that's unlikely to be due to infringement. Most code written by most companies has been written a thousand times already, and there is nothing illegal about recreating a library which behaves the same as something you wrote at a company.
• hgal 2y ago
  "Work for yourself, not for your employer. Your employer will fire you the second it is profitable for them, that's how it is." Maybe that's true for your employer. But it's bold to generalize. Certainly not true for the company where I work. And a quite sad view.
  • hnbad 2y ago
    Hi, former employer here who valued employees over profitability. It's true for all employers. Your job as a business owner is not to provide jobs to your employees, it's to keep the business afloat and maintain your income. There are limits to how much of a good person you can be, those limits are set by the economic system we exist in. Ignoring these limits will cause your business to fail. It's a sad view and it's not entirely accurate but it has better predictive power than the rose-tinted glasses you and possibly your employer may be wearing. Profitability is the baseline requirement, all else comes after. That's how a market economy works. If you remain at a stable net-zero that's great as long as nothing ever changes but it means you're extremely vulnerable to any disruption. To be clear: I'm not even talking about shareholders. This is true for private businesses too, maybe even more so. Profit means reserves, reserves mean being able to survive dips and downturns. But when the market changes you need to adjust and adjustment means the value of an employee can change drastically and it may be better to replace someone who was a great fit for the old market with someone who's a better fit for the new market. Sentimentality is a competitive disadvantage. You can balk at the morality and decency of this and I'd agree with you but you shouldn't be upset about the persons, you should be upset about the system that is requiring those persons to act this way in order to stay afloat.
    • palata 2y ago
      This. I don't mean it as a criticism towards the employer: if they ignored profit and favoured the employees they would go out of business and eventually that would be bad for the employees as well. It's just how it is: your employer is not your friend. It's a contract.
      • renegat0x0 2y ago
• tetris11 2y ago
  We need more timebomb licenses. The company owns your code for X years, to which they can gain market advantage and make their money. After X years, it goes MIT/GPL. It benefits the coder, it benefits society, and the company gets that sweet temporary window of profitability over their competitors as they always have since time immemorial.
  • palata 2y ago
    If you can convince your company to do that, you can probably convince them to use a copyleft license, I would think.
    • tetris11 2y ago
      The benefit of the timebomb is that it gives a company half a decade or more to make their money. If it was copyleft from the getgo, then it'd be hard for the company to compete at all, which is a position I can understand.
      • palata 2y ago
        > then it'd be hard for the company to compete at all It depends on the codebase obviously, but you would have to prove that. On the other hand, if you open source it properly you may get contributions, which is valuable for the company.
• sjamaan 2y ago
  Open sourcing is only really beneficial to yourself if the code is usable in your new job. Hopefully you're trying something new and growing - you probably shouldn't be switching jobs to work on the same kind of problems (or even with the same tech stack). Of course, if the open sourced project becomes wildly popular it's great for your CV, but that doesn't typically happen. Also, just flinging the code out in the open isn't enough. The company needs to be a good steward of your open sourced contributions. At my last job I left a few reusable open source Django components which I thought were very nice (and others are using it), but nobody felt responsible to take care of the project, so it languished. Now it is several Django versions behind and has bug reports which aren't being fixed. This was rather disappointing to me. I had really expected better because my colleagues in general were typically pro open source. I'm not using Django anymore, and I'm not inclined to put any personal time into it to keep the project alive.
  • palata 2y ago
    At least it's part of your portfolio: you can show that code. What's the worst case? The code just gets unmaintained and dies. That's not a problem at all.
  • _w1tm 2y ago
    > This was rather disappointing to me. I had really expected better because my colleagues in general were typically pro open source. I'm not using Django anymore, and I'm not inclined to put any personal time into it to keep the project alive. Why would your colleagues want to maintain your pet project instead of making their own? Most open source projects live or die with their main contributors, if you expected the company to spend money maintaining your project then that’s the wrong expectation in my opinion.
    • sjamaan 2y ago
      > Why would your colleagues want to maintain your pet project instead of making their own? The projects in question were Django model field types, which I used in the larger projects I was working on. I made them available on PyPi so they're re-usable by others, and for easier installation. Maintaining these should be in their own interest, as the projects in which they are used are mission-critical systems for their customers. Presumably they haven't upgraded their Django in ages, so they didn't need to do any maintenance on these packages. But still, a) they may hit these bugs themselves sooner or later and b) the projects exist under the company's GitHub profile, so it makes them look bad.
• moffkalast 2y ago
  > ask for a raise The problem is that employers make this process as toxic as it possibly can be, using every trick in the book of emotional manipulation, making you feel like you're blackmailing them and literally destroying their life. Adds a lot of resentment on both sides every time regardless of outcome and it just accumulates.
  • rprospero 2y ago
    When I was young, my father worked for a place where asking for a raise was a fireable offence. The founder had been a pioneer in the modern cattle-not-pets attitude toward servers, except he applied it to developers. When an employee asked for a raise, it meant on of two things: 1. The employee was a vain troublemaker who had over-value what they were worth in the market. Firing them would not only remove an inefficiency from the system (as they were likely not to work as hard if they believed that they were underpaid), but it would also helpfully remind the other developers that they were all expendable. 2. The employee was a 10x developer who was vital to the company processes and could command a much higher salary somewhere else. Even if you gave them a raise today, they could be hit by a bus tomorrow. The best course of action was to simply rip off the band aid. Fire the employee, have security immediately escort them from the building, and begin triage to ensure that the critical systems that they wrote/managed could be handled by the next resume in HR's pile. The line I will always remember is: Developer are like eggs. They are heavily undervalued, but also will crack under too much pressure. Thankfully, like eggs, you can buy them for cheap in packs of twelve, so it doesn't matter if you break a few.
    • throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
      This is not an ideal way to run most companies however I can see this work under a few conditions. 1) This policy is known and communicated to current and future hires. 2) The company has found a way to pay each person the current market rate and makes efforts to adjust accordingly. Otherwise why would anyone stay?
      • rprospero 2y ago
• kortilla 2y ago
  > As developers, IMHO you should always push for open sourcing as much as you can, ideally with a copyleft license and no CLA. Because it is beneficial for you personally Agree with the rest of your message but this is really dumb and will hurt your career. You need to think about what you’re writing and determine if there is any reason the employer would be supportive of this. Ive been in SWE management for roughly 20 years now and if you get labeled as “the person who wants everything open source”, you get put in a very limiting box. You advertise that your interests aren’t really aligned with the company and you’ll be treated as a mercenary. This seems okay on the surface, but it will exclude you from working on critical business code that would be ridiculous to open source.
  • namaria 2y ago
    Yet all software companies and to a lesser extent the whole economy depend on open source software to function. In my opinion, the toxic attitude is marginalizing developers who see that.
  • bravetraveler 2y ago
    I'll be honest, getting paid is good for my career. What code I specifically get paid to monkey over weighs on it far less. Totally agree with avoiding labeling yourself more generically, but having spent enough time in the sun... I just want shade. I work to get paid, not get acclaim or friends. At a certain point your professional development stops being at work. Being a mercenary is an interesting way to consider that, actually. For yourself, nobody else will. I'm not even a developer. I do SRE which kind of requires I play one while not being on the friendliest terms with the real devs: "oh, that guy again" I guess my point is this: don't subject yourself to whims... but do be amenable. Just not too much. It's easy to become the sucker. Don't accept working on business critical code without business critical pay. It's just a weird way to look at things.
  • palata 2y ago
    > Ive been in SWE management for roughly 20 years now and if you get labeled as “the person who wants everything open source” Not if you do it right. Don't be "the person who complains about stuff not being open source". I believe I have been pretty successful at open sourcing a lot of my code. Sometimes by convincing my management that it was good for the company, sometimes by manipulating them (I guess it would mean I manipulated people in your position :-) ). Not in a way that hurt the company at all: I never open sourced anything where it actually mattered for the company. I see it like this: when given the choice between not open sourcing (no work needed) and open sourcing (some work needed), every rational manager will go for the former ("I don't care about it, so don't wait my resources for it"). I just adapt my narrative to make it sound like it is cheaper to open source, and everybody is happy!
• Aeolun 2y ago
  > I really don't get why developers sometimes go out of their way to help their employer keep their code proprietary I think it’s more that we hate dealing with any kind of bureaucracy?
  • palata 2y ago
    Fair point. I just feel like it doesn't cost much to learn about open source licenses, and developers would benefit from it. I managed to open source a lot of code just by convincing managers (sometimes in a manipulative way, but that's the game: they do that, too). It did not imply any bureaucracy.