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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?

#271

Post by awillen »

DangitBobby wrote: post #29
awillen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have to pay you a cool sum of money for it? It sounds pretty clearly like you did it for work, so unless you have a very unique employment contract, they already own it.

You are making a pretty good case for why they should continue to not share it with anyone.

Why? It sounds like it's built on an internal platform, so there's no other use for it. Sharing it with other people at the company would at least improve his reputation with those people, which could be helpful down the line.

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

#272

Post by IshKebab »

shadowgovt wrote: post #178
edoceo wrote: post #116

When I was 20 (c1997) I took this job, it had a FileMaker database for tracking tickets. And then my team mates all had to review that system to manually fill out a Word document with hours. So I made a little code to pull from FM and put into Word. So we could fill these forms, required for payroll, in minutes rather than hours (not a joke). And my team mates loved it. And then our lead claimed it as his own work, p…

This is one of the less-obvious benefits of robust version control with authorship history.

If you're at the point where you're going over your bosses head to point out that he's stealing credit it doesn't really matter if you can prove you are right.

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

#273

Post by shadowgovt »

IshKebab wrote: post #272
shadowgovt wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the less-obvious benefits of robust version control with authorship history.

If you're at the point where you're going over your bosses head to point out that he's stealing credit it doesn't really matter if you can prove you are right.

Oh in my experience it very much does.

Companies are loathe to fire someone without a paper trail. Bring them a paper trail and you can unseat an unpopular manager that their bosses have lacked the evidence to fire.

... sometimes. Sometimes the tree is rotten to the trunk. There's no hard-and-fast universal rule here.

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

#274

Post by awillen »

dkersten wrote: post #21
awillen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they have to pay you a cool sum of money for it? It sounds pretty clearly like you did it for work, so unless you have a very unique employment contract, they already own it.

For work sure, but it also sounds to me that it was built during personal time. If I use my own time to make something, work isn’t getting it without paying for it. I don’t care what the contract says about personal projects (although I‘ve also never signed one of those “we own everything you do outside of work” clauses because I find them exploitative and abusive)

I agree with you on the personal projects stuff and have also had that language struck from contracts (I've published a couple of short books on Amazon and had one contract that pretty clearly said my employer would be entitled to profits from those books... pass).

But in terms of building it on personal time, I'm iffy on that. Obviously in tech the time tends to blend together... I've worked on weekends but also spent half a day doing personal stuff when I'm WFH and I have very little on my plate. It seems to me like the more relevant fact is that he clearly built this for his job - to me, that makes it feel like this is a situation where the employer claiming ownership isn't abusive at all. If he never would've built this if not for being employed at that job, and he used it primarily in that job, isn't it fair to say he made it as part of the job?

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

#276

Post by varsketiz »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #156
varsketiz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you consider it unproductive? I think the perspective provided is very reasonable - if something did not work once, maybe you shouldn't stop doing it forever. What do you think would be a productive response to this complaint?

Actually I think it's on you to say why you don't think the response was unproductive.

I did that in my comment by rephrasing slingnow. That I think was the productive bit of their comment. I think the unproductive bit was that dawnerd just wanted to vent and was not asking for feedback, so giving them feedback... is unproductive :)

But then, if you are posting something in a forum where people can comment on what you wrote, are you really not asking for feedback?

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

#277

Post by varsketiz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #219
varsketiz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you consider it unproductive? I think the perspective provided is very reasonable - if something did not work once, maybe you shouldn't stop doing it forever. What do you think would be a productive response to this complaint?

Because it's just snarky.

I would say it's poking fun, rather than snarky. Also, even if you consider it snarky, it's more than "just" snarky. It has some insight in it.

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

#278

Post by cfn »

speedgoose wrote: post #154
cfn wrote: post #136

Since everyone is trading stories, here is mine: I once worked in a newspaper at the start of desktop publishing (DTP) and Word. They received the news from Reuters (as an example) in some strange format and had two people employed specifically to reformat and correct that text using Word before going to DTP. I wrote a Word macro (more like half recorded, half edited) that did 90% of the work because it was painful f…

Did you tell their boss?

It wasn't my job to tell anyone (although he found out and simply got other jobs for them to do). I wasn't even a dev back then but a journalist that took an interest in anything that involved computers.

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

#279

Post by hanse-den0 »

I avoid communicating with HN completely and this is an account I just created to respond to you.

> Let's say I found a way to bring back the number of dislikes of YT videos. Knowing that some YT devs are on the platform, I'd be reluctant to share it so that they won't know about it [0] and ruin the already-ruined YT experience. It shouldn't be like this, I know. But I've lost hope in the well-intentions of some devs in the industry. I thought we were supposed to have each other's back, but apparently money makes people do anything.

Think you are blaming the wrong people here. Developers do not decide what will be done/removed in an app like YT, managers do. Of course they do it for the money (or some personal thing).

Sure there is people upholding solidarity as a principle and support you but there will always we those who play zero sum games (see Watzlawick) and those who really don't know better than to offend others being insensitive.

> ... watched a YT tutorial to sharpen your skills? Now w/o the dislikes count, all devs have a much harder time filtering useless videos.

Only very specific topics and most of the time I have to find out if the approach taken in the video (still) works either way. On a personal note: I prefer learning new stuff from other people (not only devs), by reading the documentation and get some hands on experience. YT feels like it's making me unproductive because it seeks attention too much and also a lot of people there are behaving in a very annoying way (because they seek attention, too and because they want to make money).

The reason I don't communicate with HN (anymore) is the strong US-centric view which in my opinion is prevalent here and it's just not my community because I don't share much with them (believes, lifestyle etc.). It is a news aggregator for me and the comments let me know what (rich) people in the US think about those headlines.

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

#280

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

varsketiz wrote: post #276
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I think it's on you to say why you don't think the response was unproductive.

I did that in my comment by rephrasing slingnow. That I think was the productive bit of their comment. I think the unproductive bit was that dawnerd just wanted to vent and was not asking for feedback, so giving them feedback... is unproductive :) But then, if you are posting something in a forum where people can comment on what you wrote, are you really not asking for feedback?

mmm, I'd say that it would to be silly to complain about feedback but just posting something doesn't mean you're asking for it.
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