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Comment by jaekwon | Hacker News Reader

I agree, that companies should be prepared for developers to leave.

I maintain that developers and engineers should leave their work maintainable.

I know I'm going to get downvoted, but this needs to be said. With great programming power comes great programming responsibilities. And you and I know this power doesn't come from silicon or management.

We all bitch about crappy products, and fail to see the developers on the other leave their turd piles for management to "manage".

Or we bitch about crappy code left behind by the prior owners -- spitting at the sky playing musical chairs.

If you need to leave your job, at least offer to maintain your shit. Don't leave them trembling in fear. Save us greedy monkeys.

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I don't think anyone disagrees with your fundamental point- they object at your assumption that ryanelkins acted irresponsibly and left behind unmaintable code, or that a developer has written unmaintainble code if users, managers, and/or devs trembling in fear when that particular dev leaves.

It's a two way street- I do my best to leave behind a maintainable code base and a documented data center, but the company being left has to do its due diligence as well.

I totally agree. I perhaps should have clarified. It's not unmaintainable due to the code, its unmaintainable due to the lack of people capable of maintaining it. This is largely due to hiring me as the sole .NET developer (where their other devs who are primarily PHP devs felt somewhat comfortable with C#) and then deciding that I should be the sole Java developer instead (yeah, I was REAL happy about that), in case they ever want to put these apps on Linux machines or something else.

Now, C# and Java are pretty close syntactically so hopefully they'll be OK. There is a huge difference in libraries and core API structure as well as deployment though, so it's not just an easy step to take. Having marginal .NET skills does not translate to marginal Java skills though. We do have a brand new Java dev, but it's really asking alot to put all of this on their shoulders with just a few months out of college.

Also a pretty big opportunity for him if he can pull it off.

>If you need to leave your job, at least offer to maintain your shit.

Isn't that the same as keeping your job but deciding you don't want to be paid for it? Typing up a polished design doc for your successor would be the best thing to do, anything more would be paid consultant work.

I agree, typing up a polished design doc should be enough. That's not something you can throw together on your last day though. You get a polished design doc by maintaining the doc and your software simultaneously.

No, it's not like you're working full time. Anyone can offer to help out a couple hours a week after they leave. It's not just good service, but it's also the most intelligent thing we can do: the original writer of software is by far in the best position to maintain it. If we all did this, we'd all benefit.

* With great programming power comes great programming responsibilities. *

Life is not a comic book turned into a movie. Companies have no responsibility to employ people. People have no responsibilities to support former employers. If the employer says "That's fine, leave" then just leave. It's a financial decision they made signaling that it is time for you to move on.

Comic books are life turned into parables.

Anyways, you're right. If the employer tells you to leave, you're not obligated to do anything besides leave.

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