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Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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