It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am. Moreover, leadership will not recognize my ingenuity as an asset, hence no added job security. No way am I going to help my company out of the goodness of my heart to be potentially let go anyway in the near future.
If developers are worried about their jobs with the way the market currently is, they should treat their personal workflows as trade secrets. My example was not specific to AI, but it applies just as much to AI workflows. In a worker's market, it was sometimes fun to share that kind of knowledge with an organization. In an employer's market, they can pay me if they want access to my personal choices.
> I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am.
That sounds like a toxic environment. Sharing those types of things is how I got the recognition to get ahead in my career and I have never once regretted it.
At least at the Fortune 500 level, there are only toxic environments. And job security has never been weaker.
In my place of employment, anything I create while on company time or using company resources is the property of my employer.
So while it might be nice to say I won't share, boss-man can certainly make it so I must share.
Ownership of the IP, as it were, is certainly true, but usually with these tools, most of the battle is documenting it, training people, answering questions, etc., and if you aren't motivated to do that it's very hard to make it happen.
Boss-man actually has a very difficult time turning legal theoretic right into actual deliverables.
They can't force you to share what they don't know about or don't understand.
Exactly. I get why multiple people are replying that my company owns what I make on their time, but it's honestly funny as hell to me that people think most management at any company cares about or understands some CLI tool enough that they would know about it in the first place or actually go through the effort to force one to hand it over. That's gotta be really rare. Being concerned about that is like being afraid drive through a red light at an empty intersection when you're the only car on the road at 3am.
It's not about that, it's about the incentive...
Over the years, I too have developed ad hoc tools to make my job easier or faster. I don't hide them, but I do not share any since the tools are not really ready for that. I don't have them properly documented, other people would not understand how to use them, why and all the quirks. I suppose a lot of developers do the same.
Yeah, if there is no gain then employees shouldn't be giving any more than exactly what they were hired for. Most big companies are and should be treated as adversarial, because they won't think twice about dropping your ass, you are just a name in the HR departments computers to anyone you don't directly work with every single day. I think a lot of tech employees bought into all the bullshit because they made such good money and were for awhile uncommonly skilled. But their uncommon skill sets have become more and more common while the actual knowledge needed by individual employees has dropped. All the garbage conditions many game programmers and artists have to deal with? Yeah that is coming for the entire tech industry, and that isn't the low point, that is the shit pile just picking up speed. It should be obvious looking at almost every other industry after a few decades.
I sadly have to agree with this. In a collaborative "give and take" world sharing is good. In an environment that takes only, all you have left is your own intellectual property. It is your own most vital asset worth protecting. Shouldn't be like this, but it is.
But if you made it at work, it’s not your intellectual property.
I'm talking about your personal knowledge base and your processes for getting stuff done, you take that with you when you leave and it belongs to you. Of course what you create belongs to your employer.
I go completely the opposite direction. I stick my name right in the script and write a wiki page documenting it as clearly as I can manage. It becomes part of my value proposition to the company.
I don't think this way because I like to collaborate. If a colleague can benefit from a tool I made I'm proud to save them time. I also think your attitude doesn't pass the golden rule: would you like to work on a team full of people like you?
I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.
But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.
It does seem like a highly antagonistic way of working or perhaps I'm just naive.
If your only goal is to maintain a performance lead on your peers, you either need to gain and keep an advantage or find ways to actively make your coworkers disadvantaged (or both). And if you're already doing 1) then 2) isn't a far stretch.
> would you like to work on a team full of people like you?
If their team is already like this, what choice do they have? It's a prisoners dilemma where everyone else is defecting and I'm the sole cooperator.
IMO the onus for solving this is on the business owner, either through establishing a knowledge sharing culture or more comprehensive performance evaluation that rewards these innovations.
> I don't think this way because I like to collaborate.
Nice passive aggressive dig!
It sucks to work with people like you, honestly. Prima-Donna types that overindex on their own personal paranoias instead of trying to succeed, grow, and excel along with the people around them. Quite literally not a team player.
> I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier
I mean, according to your employment agreement, that code is owned by your employer, since you wrote it as an employee for use at work. They could easily demand that you share it, if they knew it existed.
This just illustrates that smart people figure out their own productivity/time-saving shortcuts at work, and little scripts and tools like this are part of it. Happens all the time. Other employees don't, and just plod through whatever manual process they were trained to do.
Yeah, well, I challenge them to do that. In the meantime, I'll keep it to myself.
Contracts vary, but here if your employer tells you to do work ("document and deliver a tool that does X") and you refuse, here that's grounds for warning process and dismissal as a breach of contract.
His employer didn't tell him to do that.
You have to get used to acting within the grey area and playing politics. Your counterparty (your employer) certainly does. Every businessperson is good at it, or they wouldn't be successful.
In any transactional relationship - which employment is - when you want to do something, don't think: I can't do this because they wouldn't like it. Instead think: what are the likely consequences of doing this? Are they positive or negative for me, on net?
What are your thoughts on open source? Seems like the same problem writ large
I love open source, but you are correct in identifying it as a very similar problem, though it's more a problem with software licensing than source code being publically available. Usually the argument is made that FOSS ends up as free labor, which is true in a lot of ways, but I see FOSS devaluing software as a whole. When software is open and libre, that sends a psychological signal that the software isn't that valuable. There would still be FOSS in a world where even projects like React charged a licensing fee to big organizations, but in that case there would be more choice between YOLO with free software or paying for quality software; as token expenses have proven, many companies could absolutely pay for the latter many times over. In terms of specifically open source, however, companies get a bit of a loophole in that their own employees (or LLM of choice) can be "inspired* by the source code and clone aspects of commercial software. This has the effect of devaluing the skill of individual software engineers to being glorified script kiddies.
The entire internet is built on open source software. Oss didn’t send a signal of invaluable. What!?