Re:Ending PHP Support, and the Future of Hack
by wrmsr on Friday September 14, 2018 @09:05PM
(#17992338)
On the flipside as I've seen from Google if you're already an attractive enough target for potential employees to pay the price of ramp-up the privacy of your stack serves to lock those employees that prove worthwhile into experience that's non-transferrable were they to explore other options. Granted G is special as anyone hiring knows but I don't imagine they're the only ones aware of and playing that game.
I imagine, at that scale, that opensourcing is a big win because you can have a proprietary stack, but still hire people that already know it, or won't be reluctant to invest a few years of their life into working on it. You also don't have to pay as much for educating new hires as you would for a totally closed proprietary stack, and new people faster become productive. Hiring contractors that work with that stack on a short notice also becomes easier. For a large co, these kinds of benefits might be more than enough to justify cleaning up the code enough to opensource it.