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Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

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Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#251

Post by Cullinet »

jacquesm wrote: post #173
pacaro wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1995 I had my workstation audited by the IT department. A couple of days later I'm called into a managers office and told that I'd broken policy by installing unlicensed software and that I'm in serious trouble (I was a subcontractor from the department major vendor, this manager couldn't actually discipline me in any meaningful way) I hand wrote them licenses in perpetuity to the half-dozen utilities that I'd wri…

You're way too nice.

but window dressing because unenforceable unless the subcontractors contract assigned all work product to the payor - this rather neatly turns the responsibility for unlicensed software in production over to the manager, who should have at least passed that to legal for dd, failing which I am tempted to presume that the manager was not acting in good faith.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#252

Post by hluska »

willcipriano wrote: post #55
hallway_monitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous. If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool…

The question I have is how did incentives get so misaligned that this person feels that doubling the productivity of all their peers is unlikely to be worth the effort of presenting a tool.

Have you ever tried to get something you built deployed into a company where you work?? I didn’t learn the lesson the first time so I’ve tried it twice.

If it goes badly, get ready for a fight. Some cats gain psychological comfort out of knowing everyone is doing exactly as they’ve been told. If you have one of those in your leadership chain, they’ll start questioning every single thing you have ever done. If it goes down this path, you’re fucked. You either shouldn’t have used it at all or you should have told them six months ago.

It doesn’t matter if you only built it three months ago.

If it goes well, you get to go through “code reviews” so it can be rolled out to everyone. But these aren’t the kinds of code reviews that help, they’re the kinds that demonstrate precisely why the company wasn’t capable of building it themselves. If you pass that stage, you’re the maintainer but since you built it on your own time, you can support it on your own time too.

If you make it through that stage, that’s when the feature requests start rolling in. No matter what you built, it will become a time/productivity tracker. That’s around when you start losing relationships with coworkers. You’re management’s bitch but they don’t see that. Instead, you’re the dude whose ‘simple’ tool got shoved down their throats because you want to be VP Eng when you grow up.

Humans are fucking weird. If you ever want confirmation, try to help…:)

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#253

Post by gleenn »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #141
willcipriano wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I have is how did incentives get so misaligned that this person feels that doubling the productivity of all their peers is unlikely to be worth the effort of presenting a tool.

Nobody cares about 'the company' - "In US the average share holding lasts just 22 seconds" Management can break the law, leave with their bonuses, and years down the line 'the company' gets fined. Employees are the ones that might be there for decades, but the anglosphere shareholder model allocated 0% stake to employees. TThere are alternatives: Codetermination in Germany is a concept that involves the right of work…

The average is probably horribly misrepresented. There are a ton of super long holders, which hold for decades, and a crazy high number of HFTs running that hold for microseconds. I bet nobody is actually close to the average, 22 seconds is extremely slow for software trading and extremely fast for a human. If you're using the holding duration as a proxy for people caring about companies, I think you are probably including a massive amount of HFT timing which it's clear isn't representing company loyalty. Also, what if an HFT buys and sells the same stock 1M times. The average time would likely be very short, but the "loyalty" could be 100%. Bad metric.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#254

Post by wutbrodo »

literallyWTF wrote: post #137
jdavis703 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that the whole point of software engineering? You should always be engineering yourself out of your current job. If I’m dealing with the same issues I have today, a year from now, then I’d view that as a personal failure.

I hate this mindset. I’m not trying to make my job and the job of others obsolete. I just want to get paid so I can fuck off and do some other shit I want to do.

There's always going to be people who don't care about/ take pride in/find meaning in their work. That's a totally legitimate way to approach it, but it's sort of an orthogonal discussion to the one we're having.

It's also pretty weird to "hate" that others have managed to find meaning in their work, and discuss the manner in which they do so. I don't get much enjoyment out of cars, but if I noticed that I _hated_ it when others talked about cars and insisted that they treat them only as generic conveyances, I'd probably want to do some self-reflection around my emotional state.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#255

Post by Cullinet »

peterangular wrote: post #175
notreallyserio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see not wanting to support a tool. I've written tools that automate processes in useful ways but the interfaces aren't perfect and you need some base knowledge to understand how they work. I don't want to spend my time improving and supporting those tools. I wrote them to reduce the amount of work I have to do, not add yet another responsibility. I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find cri…

> I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find criticism but no offer to help make improvements. Fuck em, wasting my time. Have experienced a ton of this too. One of the biggest internal tool mistakes of my career was to ship a tool like op's: Got yelled at for using company time to work on non-sanctioned work only to have the person yelling at me end up using my tool for 6 years. Colleagues would get…

sounds like you should have enforced your moral copyright for credit. Being denied recognition as the creator of a work is a offence and the circumstances look like a judge would direct a jury to apply statutory punitive damages, making it a relatively straightforward no win no fee case to take. IANArealL just had the role as a general partner with unlimited liability for 23 years in a computational advertising company.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#256

Post by mpmpmpmp »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #179

In your example, even if it you didn’t share it on social media but released it into the wild in back-channels and people started using it, the YT devs would figure it out eventually anyway. They would still notice downvotes happening and realize someone figured out a hack to enable that. Then they would scour the internet and dark web for it till they found it, either that or use telemetry in YT pages to reverse eng…

I think your points are still valid, but "still notice downvotes happening" doesn't make sense. You can still dislike a video on youtube. The difference is that when you go to a video with 12 million views making extraordinary claims you'll no longer see 65k downvotes and realize it's a waste of the next 12 minutes of your life and skip it.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#257

Post by bsder »

uhtred wrote: post #42
BatteryMountain wrote: post #9

Yeah I do this. Most of what I build, nobody knows about it nor is it release into the wild. Latest example: at my current workplace we have some crappy custom compilers for our platform.... I've rebuilt them in a way that I like (and using C# instead of Java), that enables me to use it in a small visual studio code plugin that enables me with real time error messages as I code against our platform, so basically cons…

I get this. If you tell people, and it gets released into the official tool chain, you will also probably then be its "owner". More work for you with no extra money.

Agreed. Ownership sucks and everybody will duck it even if they depend upon it.

Back in the Bad Old Days(tm) when disks still spun and displays weighed as much as a human, all manner of crap used to go into /usr/local but nobody would ever own it--consequently, you'd have knife fights over versions of Perl, for example. Eventually my VP turned to me as a noted BOFH and asked "This is getting out of hand, should we just delete it?" "Depends--will you fire anybody who gives me static?" "Yes." "Consider it gone."

So, I warned people for 4 weeks that everything not owned by somebody was going away. Then at 3 weeks. And at 2, 1. Then at 3 days, 2 days, the day before twice. Through all this only a single soul signed up (and it was an intern ordered to--we transferred the intern to my group and gave his manager a ding and a tongue-lashing later. But that's a different story for after more alcohol).

And finally on the magic day, I wiped it out (with a backup of course).

All holy hell broke loose. Everybody trooped to my cubicle.

To which my response was: "Great! You're here so we now know that you depend on something in /usr/local. So, which package are you the owner of?" Half of them would start screaming. Probably a third would start begging.

To which my response was: "Look. This isn't difficult. You have a dependency. Sign someone up from your group to manage the dependency. Then I'll put it back."

In spite of that, 90% of them walked away without signing up. Being dead in the water and hoping for some other poor fool to take ownership was considered less problematic than signing up for global ownership of a software tool.

That's how crappy "ownership" is in a company.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#258

Post by deltree7 »

CrazyStat wrote: post #91
deltree7 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management. Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and g…

> Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. Maybe in some imaginary world with spherical cows, infinite demand, and no friction (physical or transactional). In the real world, increasing productivity so that one person can do the job that ten used to do very often results in layoffs. 70 years ago there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard opera…

once again this is a clueless understanding of increasing productivity.

If I build a tool and make a person irrelevent, then I didn't increase productivity of the laid-off worker. I merely increased my own productivity.

What OP said was his tool specifically increased the productivity of all other users, which means his team can churn out features faster.

Show me a management team that says no to it

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#259

Post by psychoslave »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #200
Hekioi wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently the working class is doing there part as well to keep the status quo when I see the reaction of others to my statement.

Lol, it's the fault of the working class that they're oppressed? Strange world view.

Fault is a rather morally strongly conoted term, but from a cybernetic analysis, the working class is contributing to the positive feedback loop of is own oppression.

That's not to say individuals that compose the class are all willingly and stupidily acting against their own collective best interest while being convince there's a better practical way they can afford to realize with only marginal chances to end up ostracized or severely punished for the sake of the example.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#260

Post by Cullinet »

notreallyserio wrote: post #167
willcipriano wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the incentives are right, that effort is worth it. By incentives I'm not talking about a $15 TGIFridays gift card and a mention at the company meeting, I mean a meaningful portion of the value generated, rewarded quickly not "maybe next annual review". Many organizations punish the members who work hard with more uncompensated work like you have described.

Oh for sure. If they offered stock or options I'd take them up on it. Cash? I already make a good salary. Kudos? lol.

I don't think it's lol worthy despite having been the other side of the situation for most of my career.

A patent you'd want credit for. A journal paper co-authorship likewise.

I'm very much in favour - especially for non contract LOB works - journalling moral copyrights formally.

Of course we've Github and the similar now, which is amazing, if you use it for such. I am currently working on a possibility to open source a range of advertising trading middleware (dates me, huh?) with the establishment of a Community Company* copyright holding structure that rewards individual contribution regardless of origin, weighted by calling / execution paths / additional necessary weighting as necessary, enforced by statutory articles of association bound in incorporation.

* Industrial and Provident Society : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_provident_soc...

articles of association bind the company members to the terms of their articles which are imbued with the same statutory powers of Companies Act, which has 400+ statutory summary criminal offenses adjudicable in the Companies Court. Companies Court, like Ecclesiastical, isn't very well known to even exist, even among the legal profession. However, very much unlike claims heard in the Chancery Division (which must be for greater than fifty thousand British pounds or go hence to the County Courts which exist for extension of the High Court originally for handling the volume property claims, and before which I won't give the most robust tort better than a bitten nickel worth chance.)

edit was unfinished, mea : unlike in Chancery, claims in Companies Court go quickly, because the weight is summary and summary findings of breaches of Companies Act are Criminal offenses, and therefore will shape the further claims evaluation considerably. It's almost a British Delaware system, and in keeping with the theme of this discussion, I was reluctant to write this, lest case load spoil the advantages!

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