Comment by tamimio
6 months ago
Waaaay overexaggerated sentence! But I believe this wasn't about the “damage” that happened but about sending a message asserting the power dynamics between the employees and employers, as in, if you dare to do something similar or rebellious you will have your life and future ruined forever, establishing a precedent that reinforces the power hierarchy between employees and employers. The underlying message suggests that any similar acts of defiance will result in severe and harsh consequences. By the way, modern dynamics have shifted a lot of things for granted. I know personally a few developers who worked back in the 80s/90s and up to this date the companies still pay them portions of their profits because these developers are the owners of that code and have ownership rights in the code they developed, meanwhile these days under “industry standards”, the code that you spent your time/life/etc. is totally owned by the company and you, the creator, do not, the original creator retaining no ownership rights whatsoever. Hilarious! slavery? Code monkey? Whatever you want to name it but definitely it isn't a good thing. It’s a substantial shift in the balance of intellectual property rights between developers and their employers.
So if a developer owns the code he wrote, and gets paid for it’s use over time, does he also get paid while writing the code? And how do you determine how much to pay for said code? By line count, but then that goes against some chunk of income/profit which also has to be spread among marketing people’s writings, and manager’s decision outcomes, etc? I just don’t see how this works realistically, but I’m open to being enlightened.
Indeed, and to add to the irony, yours is the most downvoted comment. Developers think owning their work product is a bad idea?
Domestication. A lot of people are afraid to go against the status quo, or to be different from their colleagues, or demand things that aren't usually demanded. It shouldn't be hard for a programmer who is hired to demand that he owns the code he writes. Keep in mind too that a lot of company/startup founders are on HN and having this idea spreading around threatens their profits. Instead of having people paid peanuts to write code the company will own, then replace said people with a week's notice to bring another cheaper person, having programmers owning that code will end their exploitation model.
As for the up/down votes, I have them disabled so I don't know nor do I care about them. I actually should write that part in my signature.