I think that's a very cynical misreading of the article.
| Poster child for delusional. The developer doesn't own it, the company does. He's just trying to guilt trip them
Owning a project means that you get to drive the direction of it, not that you own the IP. This is very important, it makes people feel in control and that their work is meaningful.
| You can't hang a pine tree from your 1972 Gremlin and pass the car off as new.
Legacy code however is a reality of the software world, and a responsible software developer has to know how to deal with it. I'm sure that Facebook and Google have lots of old, forgotten and important code, but they didn't get to where they are by rewriting things every time they could be a little bit nicer. That said, the company has to make this as painless as possible for people.
| If he's doing this with employees he's already too late. This should be done during the interview and assessment process before they get hired. If you just hired someone and you're first thought is "I wonder what to do with them", then duh - they're going to start looking elsewhere.
Determining strengths and weaknesses is part of growing in a company. Most people out of college are smart, but mostly directionless. Very few have experience with distributed systems, UI/UX, concurrency, etc., and part of growing is to give them the opportunity to see what's out there, and try new things. If people feel like they're stagnating, they'll leave. Since I graduated, I've been exposed to things that I didn't even have the slightest clue existed.
The employees are not in control and their input isn't wanted. If the argument centers around making them "feel" a certain way, then that's called delusion.
Throughout the article there's no mention of anything tangible done for retention.
Combine that with the lack of interest in exploring a retention model and I (and seemingly most other contributors here) have little sympathy for someone crying "I can't keep anyone".
Quality people are easy to find, they're out there in droves. Finding a quality company is the difficult part.
Comments
I think that's a very cynical misreading of the article.
| Poster child for delusional. The developer doesn't own it, the company does. He's just trying to guilt trip them
Owning a project means that you get to drive the direction of it, not that you own the IP. This is very important, it makes people feel in control and that their work is meaningful.
| You can't hang a pine tree from your 1972 Gremlin and pass the car off as new.
Legacy code however is a reality of the software world, and a responsible software developer has to know how to deal with it. I'm sure that Facebook and Google have lots of old, forgotten and important code, but they didn't get to where they are by rewriting things every time they could be a little bit nicer. That said, the company has to make this as painless as possible for people.
| If he's doing this with employees he's already too late. This should be done during the interview and assessment process before they get hired. If you just hired someone and you're first thought is "I wonder what to do with them", then duh - they're going to start looking elsewhere.
Determining strengths and weaknesses is part of growing in a company. Most people out of college are smart, but mostly directionless. Very few have experience with distributed systems, UI/UX, concurrency, etc., and part of growing is to give them the opportunity to see what's out there, and try new things. If people feel like they're stagnating, they'll leave. Since I graduated, I've been exposed to things that I didn't even have the slightest clue existed.
The employees are not in control and their input isn't wanted. If the argument centers around making them "feel" a certain way, then that's called delusion.
Throughout the article there's no mention of anything tangible done for retention.
Combine that with the lack of interest in exploring a retention model and I (and seemingly most other contributors here) have little sympathy for someone crying "I can't keep anyone".
Quality people are easy to find, they're out there in droves. Finding a quality company is the difficult part.