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Comment by olsondv | Hacker News Reader

The post hits the nail on the head with the messy middle. There is simply no motivation to develop this sort of intelligence loop as a dev who has their own responsibilities which their job depend on. Management can ask as nicely as they want, but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free. I might share a tool if it’s useful. All the learning of how to wrangle AI or set up agents is better kept to myself if there is no recognition for sharing.

My company set up a “prompt of the week” award and brown-bag sessions to help spread adoption. We also have teams meant to develop these workflows. Clearly, they set these events up to play it off as their own productivity. Without a real (read “monetary”) incentive or job security, the risk and cost of spreading the knowledge falls squarely on the developer.

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It kinda racks my brain how a lot of people don't think this way. For example, way before the current state of AI, I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier and easier to write scripts to automate; some colleagues have noticed my tool and said I should share it, and my diplomatically worded answer is no. I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am. Moreover, leadership will not recognize my ingenuity as an asset, hence no added job security. No way am I going to help my company out of the goodness of my heart to be potentially let go anyway in the near future.

If developers are worried about their jobs with the way the market currently is, they should treat their personal workflows as trade secrets. My example was not specific to AI, but it applies just as much to AI workflows. In a worker's market, it was sometimes fun to share that kind of knowledge with an organization. In an employer's market, they can pay me if they want access to my personal choices.

What are your thoughts on open source? Seems like the same problem writ large

I love open source, but you are correct in identifying it as a very similar problem, though it's more a problem with software licensing than source code being publically available. Usually the argument is made that FOSS ends up as free labor, which is true in a lot of ways, but I see FOSS devaluing software as a whole. When software is open and libre, that sends a psychological signal that the software isn't that valuable. There would still be FOSS in a world where even projects like React charged a licensing fee to big organizations, but in that case there would be more choice between YOLO with free software or paying for quality software; as token expenses have proven, many companies could absolutely pay for the latter many times over. In terms of specifically open source, however, companies get a bit of a loophole in that their own employees (or LLM of choice) can be "inspired* by the source code and clone aspects of commercial software. This has the effect of devaluing the skill of individual software engineers to being glorified script kiddies.

The entire internet is built on open source software. Oss didn’t send a signal of invaluable. What!?

I sadly have to agree with this. In a collaborative "give and take" world sharing is good. In an environment that takes only, all you have left is your own intellectual property. It is your own most vital asset worth protecting. Shouldn't be like this, but it is.

But if you made it at work, it’s not your intellectual property.

I'm talking about your personal knowledge base and your processes for getting stuff done, you take that with you when you leave and it belongs to you. Of course what you create belongs to your employer.

I don't think this way because I like to collaborate. If a colleague can benefit from a tool I made I'm proud to save them time. I also think your attitude doesn't pass the golden rule: would you like to work on a team full of people like you?

It does seem like a highly antagonistic way of working or perhaps I'm just naive.

If your only goal is to maintain a performance lead on your peers, you either need to gain and keep an advantage or find ways to actively make your coworkers disadvantaged (or both). And if you're already doing 1) then 2) isn't a far stretch.

> would you like to work on a team full of people like you?

If their team is already like this, what choice do they have? It's a prisoners dilemma where everyone else is defecting and I'm the sole cooperator.

IMO the onus for solving this is on the business owner, either through establishing a knowledge sharing culture or more comprehensive performance evaluation that rewards these innovations.

I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.

But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.

> I don't think this way because I like to collaborate.

Nice passive aggressive dig!

Over the years, I too have developed ad hoc tools to make my job easier or faster. I don't hide them, but I do not share any since the tools are not really ready for that. I don't have them properly documented, other people would not understand how to use them, why and all the quirks. I suppose a lot of developers do the same.

In my place of employment, anything I create while on company time or using company resources is the property of my employer.

So while it might be nice to say I won't share, boss-man can certainly make it so I must share.

Ownership of the IP, as it were, is certainly true, but usually with these tools, most of the battle is documenting it, training people, answering questions, etc., and if you aren't motivated to do that it's very hard to make it happen.

Boss-man actually has a very difficult time turning legal theoretic right into actual deliverables.

It's not about that, it's about the incentive...

They can't force you to share what they don't know about or don't understand.

Exactly. I get why multiple people are replying that my company owns what I make on their time, but it's honestly funny as hell to me that people think most management at any company cares about or understands some CLI tool enough that they would know about it in the first place or actually go through the effort to force one to hand it over. That's gotta be really rare. Being concerned about that is like being afraid drive through a red light at an empty intersection when you're the only car on the road at 3am.

> I wrote my own CLI to make aspects of my job easier

I mean, according to your employment agreement, that code is owned by your employer, since you wrote it as an employee for use at work. They could easily demand that you share it, if they knew it existed.

This just illustrates that smart people figure out their own productivity/time-saving shortcuts at work, and little scripts and tools like this are part of it. Happens all the time. Other employees don't, and just plod through whatever manual process they were trained to do.

Yeah, well, I challenge them to do that. In the meantime, I'll keep it to myself.

Contracts vary, but here if your employer tells you to do work ("document and deliver a tool that does X") and you refuse, here that's grounds for warning process and dismissal as a breach of contract.

His employer didn't tell him to do that.

You have to get used to acting within the grey area and playing politics. Your counterparty (your employer) certainly does. Every businessperson is good at it, or they wouldn't be successful.

In any transactional relationship - which employment is - when you want to do something, don't think: I can't do this because they wouldn't like it. Instead think: what are the likely consequences of doing this? Are they positive or negative for me, on net?

I go completely the opposite direction. I stick my name right in the script and write a wiki page documenting it as clearly as I can manage. It becomes part of my value proposition to the company.

It sucks to work with people like you, honestly. Prima-Donna types that overindex on their own personal paranoias instead of trying to succeed, grow, and excel along with the people around them. Quite literally not a team player.

> I don't share it with anyone because of the negative return in both supporting it and everyone else being able to be as productive as I am.

That sounds like a toxic environment. Sharing those types of things is how I got the recognition to get ahead in my career and I have never once regretted it.

At least at the Fortune 500 level, there are only toxic environments. And job security has never been weaker.

Yeah, if there is no gain then employees shouldn't be giving any more than exactly what they were hired for. Most big companies are and should be treated as adversarial, because they won't think twice about dropping your ass, you are just a name in the HR departments computers to anyone you don't directly work with every single day. I think a lot of tech employees bought into all the bullshit because they made such good money and were for awhile uncommonly skilled. But their uncommon skill sets have become more and more common while the actual knowledge needed by individual employees has dropped. All the garbage conditions many game programmers and artists have to deal with? Yeah that is coming for the entire tech industry, and that isn't the low point, that is the shit pile just picking up speed. It should be obvious looking at almost every other industry after a few decades.

It sucks to treat the workplace as adversarial, but we unfortunately have to as long as companies have the zero-sum mindset of "wow, everyone is so productive and we're achieving so much, why do we have so many people again?"

And I'm not a "at work we're a family!" guy, but I wish we could just be excellent at our jobs and share it with each other without worrying if I'm digging my own grave.

>but I’m not going to selflessly share my productivity gains with the broader company for free.

If your employer is expecting that you selflessly share your time for free, you’re getting fucked. Most people are paid to do their job. They are, of course, then expected to work for their employers while on the clock.

May not have been clear. My job is not AI development. I have features to deliver. The ask from employer is to add the AI knowledge sharing on top of it. They don’t pay for that. When layoffs come, it wouldn’t save me from missed deliverables.

I refuse to use LLMs and don't have a job, so I'm just some guy.

What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. This attitude of "your job is to deliver value for the customer, anything else is a distraction, and if you share your hard-earned value-delivery techniques with others then you are a sucker" - this is new, and very disconcerting.

I understand there's not much we can do to stop the cyberpunk dystopia, but do we have to leap in head-first?

> What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc.

I definitely saw people have concerns about vimrc files and their personal library of shell scripts well before 2020, and I've seen people early in their career get burned by sharing it too. They had a tool that made them productive, it got out of their hands, and suddenly they're getting negative feedback from someone who tried using it and it didn't meet their expectations, or it got checked into the repository and now the script they used at their last job too has their current job's copyright notice and license on it, and they're perceived as being petty for trying to claw back their own intellectual property because they didn't go to the trouble of slapping legalese all over their personal tools.

Is it actually their IP? Every dev job I’ve seen has wording in the employment contract that grants the employer ownership of anything developed on company time or company hardware. So unless they made those helpful scripts off the clock on a personal computer, they probably always belonged to the employer.

This only matters if your employer cares enough to choose to create negative consequences for you. I guarantee almost no employer cares about your vim configuration technically being their IP. Even the lawyer work to figure out if it's their IP or not costs more than any possible gain they could have from claiming it.

If your employer is extremely spiteful, they might burn a pile of cash to hurt you. But that's not normal.

Or in the situation described

>it got checked into the repository and now the script they used at their last job too has their current job's copyright notice and license on it, and they're perceived as being petty for trying to claw back their own intellectual property

Where someone is causing a fuss trying to claim ownership of something they never actually owned and thinking the other people are the ones being unreasonable.

Actually every time I've seen something like what I've described above it pre-dated that person's current employment.

Those are completely different from a tool you wrote yourself: Where do they get support when something goes wrong?

This mindset has always existed in the area we're talking about, and not because it's sharing something to speed up with. It's because we don't want to get stuck doing a second job supporting the tool.

I've built all sorts of random tools for myself over the years and haven't shared a single thing, but share the tips and tricks like your examples all the time.

In 2020 we were in an extreme ZIRP phase, a time of plenty (of money). It was easier to get hired. People shared because it made them look better. It was cooperation mode. Now jobs are scarcer so it's competition mode.

I wouldn't share that with a manager even if they asked. If management were tech competent, they could proactively find inefficiencies themselves and allocate time to it instead of letting developers do all of the thinking for them.

If they gave immediate raises or bonuses for stuff like this, then things would change.

Do y'all non-sharers not have equity in your companies?

The average dev probably doesn't have any significant amount of equity in their company. The stock price at my company going up just means my quarterly checks are going to be $4 instead of $3.

These "secrets" that are being hidden are basically on the same level as gary tan's list of super uber powerful prompts.

None of it is actually that crazy that everyone else could think up.

What I've noticed in my own experience here is that even when I do share my own prompts/skills few people use them (or alternatively they were so basic that everyone already had their own version).

e.g. If someone doesn't care about xyz before AI, they probably won't after AI even if I serve them it on a silver platter.

Another angle I see is that AI tools start by benefiting the individual and the user captures the increased productivity (you could argue appearance thereof) in the form of slack time. Some tedium almost eliminated here, a problem handed off and crushed over there, and we've got an extra hour or four back in our day.

Does that person rationally go find more work to take on with that reclaimed time? Probably not unless it's their company or exceptional motivating circumstances exist.

I see a lot of this talk on HN

yet I don't see anyone question whether management will be just as excited to see that less work is needed and that it'd just result in layoffs

Oh, they would be, but the benefits of AI aren't evenly spread like peanut butter. I subscribe to the 'ai as amplifier' POV, so the fast get faster, and generally productive people don't get squeezed or the scrutiny the laggards do IME.

Contrast to remote work where the benefit was extended to all regardless of performance, thus becoming a large target for management to cut.

I think the talk about management & capital demanding ROI will be the inflection point to watch, as a downstream effect could be AI haves & have-nots, depending on open weight models' competitiveness and local capability relative to the SOTA models.

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