I hand wrote them licenses in perpetuity to the half-dozen utilities that I'd written. One was simply two API calls, it popped a message box, and if you hit ok, would restart windows without rebooting (win16)
That was my impression. It looked like he saw an opportunity to rip off a bunch of neat software (without knowing exactly what it was he was acquiring) for no money at all.
Is it a percentage of the money saved? Absolutely not.
Is it a raise? Unlikely.
Is it a pat on the back? Maybe.
Is it more work, and a lot of pain supporting the tool in ways it was never meant to be used? Absolutely.
And it'll also mean a larger workload and more stress now that the company knows how much easier the job is now.
With that outlook, why would they share it? It makes their life better and easier as it is, and releasing the tool is all or mostly negative.
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 pissy with me when drift happened never updating the tool themselves. Was in a weird position where I had no actual "sanctioned time" to work on the tool but was still required to support it.
But... the biggest rub: my manager (yeller from above) took all of the credit when upper execs eventually caught wind as client-facing changes were happening literally days faster. Something about "building a dynamic team where people are allowed to innovate" - my name wasn't even brought up according to the exec that I was close with.
If I could go back and redo everything I'd hide my work as it caused me nothing but pain, suffering, and bitterness. The reward for good work in so many places is a crack of the whip and more work.
Many organizations punish the members who work hard with more uncompensated work like you have described.
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!
> I could see not wanting to support a tool.
So my refusal to drop the emergency that I was fixing (on my day off) in order to modify this tool that had already saved her probably tens of hours of tedium, let to resentment and ultimately to me being fired from the place.
I'm in a much better place now ))
Man, we live in a society… glad you are in a better place now!
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 workers to participate in management of the companies they work for.
"There are different ways of slicing it, but Reuters calculations based on New York stock exchange data show the average holding period for U.S. shares was 5-1/2 months in June, versus 8-1/2 months at end-2019."
For some reason, at first, I read this as "Code termination" (not co-determination) and thought it was a mistranslation of some German compound noun, and I was confused.
That said the original comment doesn't seem to be coming at this purely from an angle of practicality.
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…:)
Then you have the problem that the reward for good work is almost always more work.
Other than that, there is a ton of admin/red tape to get past if I want to introduce it as official tools and some team needs to be able to support it.
My intentions are actually not malicious at all, I'm just reducing my own frustrations and avoiding adding more stuff onto my plate.
It's our fucking job to optimize the world around us.
How do you think can we, as a society, advance while doing bullshit jobs?
Make me obsolete!
You’ll just end up broke and without a job.
2/3 of all consumption is accepted to add no incremental happiness[2]
2/3 of all CO2 emissions can be eliminated through careful lifestyle management and community design.[3]
These quantities do not seem coincidental and they point to a better way of doing things.
You're not wrong, there's no incentive currently to 'pay us back'. But collectively we are working three times as much as necessary so we can afford things that don't make us happy, and there is no way to sustain that state of affairs beyond the next hundred years or so. Scamming or strong-arming the ruling class into paying most of us for work that doesn't add value may be in our best interest in the short term, but for the long term we need to start acknowledging that it's not in anyone's interest that this state of affairs continue.
[1]Bullshit Jobs, the book [2]the Financial-independence-retire-early (FIRE) community [3]studies I came across in my degree on sustainable energy engineering
I mean you’re not wrong, once we purge a large chunk of the population, since ya know, they’ll have no way to provide for themselves, we will have a much greener planet.
I'd actually seriously like to know, do you want people to have to do work that doesn't add value?
Source: I used to be on SSI disability. This is income for those that are so disabled they are never expected to be capable of working. The average SSI payment is something like $585 / mo. Well below the poverty line and any dignified existence. If this is how we treat our most vulnerable, how will we treat those who have simply been automated out of a job?
I want a society were no one needs to work and we only reach it when the amount of people we need is getting so much less that our society needs to rethink this "work".
Without a job? My work ethic is to work in a way that I'm not needed.
And still I'm needed but instead of doing the same old shit everyday I can innovate because I don't need to fix old shitty written stuff.
However, it's a mistake to believe the rich and powerful will allow such a society to exist since they'd be powerless in it. They will impose artificial scarcity on it in order to maintain the existence of capitalism and their fortunes. Just look at how copyright is ruining free computing and the free internet.
I'm having trouble imagining how such a transition would even look. I mean, do we still have some sort of recognition of property rights for existing property? If not, then how are the currently owned resources "freed"?
If so, then the wealthy would still be wealthy and there'd still be "classes". So, I'm not sure they'd mind so much, but for consideration of their offspring (which I don't discount).
In either case, how do we go about allocating future resources?
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.
Do you understand how dumb your logic is? Or are you going to continue to hand wave literally everything
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 generalization, which is incredibly hard. Some people may even hate it, because they have their own best way to do things.
Devs should stop being delusional about their self-importance in these things. There are 100 other factors going on in an org and your one little tool ain't gonna make a penny difference in the profitability or productivity of the company (unless you have data to prove it, including impact on profitability)
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 operators in the US. Productivity increased and they got laid off.
Yeah, several years ago, our corporate overlords sold off a database we created to a competitor and leased it back from them. Now, we're trying to recreate that database to avoid the financial overhead. I'm sure at the time it made sense to some bean counter but it was penny-wise, pound-foolish in the long term.
I think now it's impossible to think long term financially. Thanks, Wall Street.
They won't put that in the end user facing presentation, but you can count on it being part of the executive pitch.
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
It's naive and boneheaded to insist that productivity increases never result in layoffs.
Once, I worked for a medical claims company. We had a dozen people who just worked on processing claims. I wrote some software that cut the claim processing time in half. Instead of finding new work for the claims processors, they literally laid off half of them. I have never felt worse, as a software developer than I did that day. Management was so short sighted at that company.
Which is often the case even in product development. They know the existing product is only going to be useful for the next few years. They know they need something new to build on the line. But somehow the development of that new thing is seen as pure cost rather than an investment in the future.
This is either trivial or underdetermined. It depends on how you define "unproductive":
- If you define "unproductive" as "produces at a lesser rate than the new, increased productivity level" then it's just a tautology.
- If your definition of "unproductive" is not relative to the new rate, then you have to stipulate a reasonable definition of "productivity" and show that it was not being met prior to the automation. You haven't done this.
It might turn out that the second bullet is easy enough to do in the domain you're talking about. But it's worth using language precisely if you're going to tell people that they have a "dumb understanding" of whatever you're discussing.
Also, your assumption about tooling is 100% incorrect as I myself have written tooling that was saving an org 35k a day, in a single market.
If I build a tool, that makes someone else irrelevant, that increased my productivity, but not the person who is now irrelevant. Yes, that person gets laid off. So, your tool leading to firing a legal assistant is not what we are talking here.
If I build a tool, that makes every other developer more productive, then the team can build more features or fix more bugs.
Show me one software team that doesn't have a backlog of bugs and features that would not benefit from increased productivity and leading to laying of people in the team.
This is false. My org has seen millions of dollars of savings many times on the backs of tools. Improving developer productivity, and it sounds like ops tool would be huge for productivity, is extremely valuable.
If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool. But if I'm working at a large enterprise and increasing productivity may only lead to laying people off I have exactly zero motivation to share something like this.