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Publicly credit your employees

superted.io

41 pointssuperted18 comments

Microsoft and a lot of other developers used to add "credits" or easter eggs to their programs. At least for Microsoft it was the customers that complained about them. In retrospect they likely went too far incorporating full fledged games complete with DOOM style 3D engines [1], but it was a good morale booster for the developers and a chance to add some culture to their work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwg9eLHZZRo

As far as I know, they've since banned such easter eggs because of compliance rules (US federal laws require that all features of a product must be documented for a product to be considered for government use)

They could have documented the Easter egg as a workaround. But the real issue was in places where things like Solitaire were removed from the computers employees were playing these games in Excel and other apps which couldn't be removed.

Possible Problem: My dad was a structural engineer and made some very nice brochures with photos of all his awesome employees on it. His competitors used the information to poach them.

So he wasn't paying them enough?

(But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for employers.)

> (But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for employers.)

From an employer's perspective it's great so long as everyone else is doing it and not them :-)

I assume the employees were also on Linkedin.

Poaching is rarely a problem if the employee feels valued and doesn't feel like they're being ripped off by their employer. Just saying.

humans.txt already exists. http://humanstxt.org/

i was going to mention this. +1

A few years ago, I spent on some time on spinning this issue around and giving employees a way to request public validation of their contributions from their employers. Sort of asking your manager to give you a public endorsement of your contributions every six months or so. I talked to a few managers and every one said companies wouldn't accept such a thing.

Any novel thoughts on how to get around that obstacle ?

The reason is often they don't want to get their employees poached.

Sometimes there just isn't enough money yet (or reasons to believe that the money is best used else where) and they haven't had the time/luxury/discipline/etc. to make sure someone leaving doesn't cause major issues.

How many people here actually read the credits for a movie? I mean, I've worked on movies and I don't read the credits. Would anyone even read credits for software if they existed?

I guess if it's just a token of appreciation for employees and it only matters to them, sure. From the company's perspective, I don't see it being much of anything more than a poach list of their best employees though.

If individuals want public exposure, they should be allowed to write about their work for a company blog.

Huh, I tend to read them. At least in the sense of "I wonder if John Smith of production assistants #2 was the funny guy, or if Sarah on animation #12 helped make the second scene". And sometimes you get fun post credit scenes. But feels like a way to give a props to people I may never even meet.

Adobe products used to run the credits during application startup.

This becomes useless if you have a common name. Was it me, or the famous author with my name, or the person who worked on visual studio Google recruiters think they're emailing when they email me?

The screen actors guild fixes this problem by requiring all members to adopt unique names, but there is no such organization in our field.

How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

> How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

You're absolutely right that we do not expect to stay with one employer for life. Maybe I misunderstood it but it seems like the point is that because we don't stay with the same employers for our whole lives, the original article equates it to working on a movie or a television show where we credit people. Maybe we can even create some sort of an IMdb as a who's who of software development. It would be so cool, don't you think?

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