Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

> convince management of the value

This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.

There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.

Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:

> I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…

Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.

My opinion is that deleting the thing is a very dangerous move.

But it depends, if it is running on your own work computer/session, and it is like cleaning up you data when leaving might be ok.

As a real answer, we would need to know what are the terms of the contract of this person.

His job description should be clearly stated inside and we would know if there is a kind of right/ copyright assignment to the company.

If it is not the case, and it was not in his job description , it is easy to argue that the employee legally kept the copy right and rights on the software.

So he could legally tell the employer that it is not allowed to use the software except buying it.

The only gray area is if it was done during work hours with the employer willing fully agreed to have the employee spend some time working on that.

> What made a difference was getting people in my team to stop doing it, and making it clear when things were requested and timescales and why we were not able to do it. When deadlines started getting missed, the guy got put under a lot of pressure to change the processes, and eventually the business hired someone that ultimately diminished the original guy's role.

This is the way. If a process is slowing you down, let it slow you down to a grinding halt. BUT document and communicate the reason clearly, frequently and to the correct people.

If you can attach a clear cost to the process being slow, even better.