I once said to the CTO of the company I worked for "do we back up our source code"?
He said, "no, it's on github".
I said no more.
He said, "no, it's on github".
I said no more.
If your boss is that daft, its probably a sign to bail out. Remember to do your own personal due diligence. Due dill is not something that you just do for someone else: do your own! Do your own personal risk assessment. If code was lost, who would be found accountable? You or them?
EDIT: PS - I am a CTO ...
Unless github closes the account, or a hacker gets access, or a rogue employee gets mad and deletes all, or some development accident results in repo deletion, or etc etc.
And no one else in the company knew what GitHub was.
Company was founded by "visionary" CEO that is an sculptor and doesn't understand tech.
Most crucial employee is young guy hired right out of college.
Company now has 50+ developers, but the critical software is still made by that guy several years later.
Critical guy still get recent graduate salary, notices he is actually the most important person in the company, and asks for a raise.
Company denies his raise. He quits. Company hire a bunch of developers from cheap third world countries to replace him...
Company learns: 1. All software guy made a bit before he asked for a raise was on his personal, not company github. 2. The software is in other programming languages, not the one the company uses normally. 3. Everything the guy wrote since he joined the company, is extremely difficult to maintain, guy is a genius and all his code is correct, clean and well made, but his thought patterns and how they end in the code are just too different, and all people that worked with him before also were geniuses and didn't care the code was "crazy".
Note: the "other geniuses" mentioned above, also quit when other companies made them great offer and the stingy employer refused them a raise too.
The guy writing scripts for a hardware test platform hosted them on a paid GitHub account.
System would pull the latest files off GitHub until the account ran out and the whole thing broke, months after he was gone.
The strategy is about as silly as having ten babies and expecting that one of them will make it. It is what you would expect out of the worst poverty-ridden parts of Africa.
An alternative is to select and nurture your investments really well, so the rate of success is much higher. I'd like to see the script be flipped, whereby 90% of investments go on to becoming profit making, secondarily with their stable cash income being preferred to big exits.
Oh boy.
Tons of apps in maintenance mode run critical infrastructure and see few commits in a year.
The people wouldn't, but in the environments I'm thinking of, security policies might.
What you're leaning into is a high-risk backup strategy that would rely mostly on luck to get something remotely close to the current version back online. It's pretty reckless.
In environments that go so far (deleting local checkouts of code out of security concerns), I bet they do have a mirror/copy of the version controlled code.
To step outside just utility programs, the reason why Command & Conquer didn't have a remaster was:
> I'm not going to get into this conversation, but I feel this needs to be answered. During this project of getting the games on Steam, no source code from any legacy games showed up in the archives.
Software still runs, and if you don't have the source then you'll only have the binary or other build artifact.
In fact, in VSCode, one can use a project without cloning and checking it out at all.
By “onto git”, do you mean “onto GitHub”? I really wish people would stop conflating the two.
In fact, I can't tell whether this confusion is just another symptom of, or a (major?) part of the reason for, why we're in the mess we're in.
Just making and committing to a repo at all is a step that implies a certain level of caretaking.
Additionally to that, if any of those developers have a backup strategy for their local computer, those also count as a backup of that source code.
CTO: "I know our entire github repo is deleted and all our source code is gone and we never took backups, but I'm hoping the developers might have it all on their machines."
CEO: "Hoping developers had it locally was your strategy for protecting all our source code?"
CTO: "It's a sound approach and ticks all the boxes."
CEO: "You're fired."
Board Directors to CEO: "You're fired."
If not MBA, the problem may also stem from the gradual atrophy and disrespect shown towards the sysadmin profession.