> If this is a core conceit of the thinking then my answer is who cares?
Yep. At the end of the day, it's very simple:
People working for a company are not ants or bees. A company is not a hive and people are not going to put down their own interests to serve the hive. We are a bunch of cooperating, but ultimately independent agents, who act in their own benefit.
It is up to the business owner to keep their employee activity in check. Does that mean giving them work to do? Checking on the progress of their tasks? Checking on their methodology and software stack sustainability? Making sure there are no single points of failure for the business? Making sure the "IT know-how" of the business is preserved when a person leaves? ALL OF THE ABOVE!
When a business owner can't do these periodic checks themselves, they're free to hire someone that will do this for them.
But the idea that individual developers should care about what happens to the business after they leave is just preposterous.
Also, the entire "resume driven development" thing is absurd. This has always happened in software development. People care a lot about what their resume will look like in 5 years. It's perfectly normal and the business benefits too ("we use modern tools, come work for us"). It doesn't mean the business should allow needless "shiny new thing" syndrome to thrive, but you should watch out to not stomp out innovation or you might find yourself unable to hire talented devs because no one wants to work on your shitty "php with jquery" web app.
> But the idea that individual developers should care about what happens to the business after they leave is just preposterous.
It's not about caring after you leave. It's while you stay caring enough to do useful things for the company. Sure, you can be like a consultant (require very specific requirements and not trying to understand or put things in perspective), but as an employer these are the first people that I will let go because they bring less value than someone that "cares" (again, while being there, not after they left)
Yes. Put another way, this school of thought concerns professionalism while you're there, when you already know that what you do will still have effects after you're gone.
A different school of thought is that a job is about showing up and doing some interpretation of what your your manager tells you to do. This might not be very aligned, and much of the org chart might not be very aligned, so the priority tends to be appearances. Manager told you to make a Web site that does X, so you try to make a Web site that arguably does X. You don't tell the manager all the factors that in a better organization they should care about, and you maybe don't do a particularly good job of the site you do make, and you definitely don't base all your implementation decisions based on company needs rather than your own resume and political capital. But you're satisfied that you arguably did what you were told to do, and that's the transaction.
The latter school of thought is very common, and I think it's not really due to individual ICs. Rather, usually the organization is actually pushing people towards that thinking, because the org chart and practices are also full of that kind of thinking. A more conscientious professional would blow a gasket, due to the "preposterous" situation of a company of individual irresponsible mercenary behavior and collective dysfunction like that.
I naturally subscribe to the true alignment school of thought, and that's one of the appeals of being a startup founder: I can apply my experience (and, admittedly, just as much theories/guesses) towards building a company and team where things are aligned better. It's also one of the reasons I dread some aspects of founding, because I know that, no matter how good I am about hiring and onboarding into the aligned culture, we'll sometimes have to deal with very mis-aligned (even bad-faith) people from partners/customers/investors. Not only is that unpleasant, but there's the risk of infection.
Being an individual developer that does think about those things, even if they are not actually doing them but at least helping with all those checks, is a strong differentiator for promotion and higher pay.
As an employer you _want_ these kinds of people around, helping you with process and making sure if they leave things are still functioning, thus you have more insensitive to keep them around / pay them more.
So it is in the best interest of the individual developer to work with those goals in mind too. Yes it is not your responsibility, but it can be, and that can give you more leverage in salary negotiations.
So its always good to think about “cui bono” and be sure you’re on the right side of each advice :)
Yep. At the end of the day, it's very simple:
People working for a company are not ants or bees. A company is not a hive and people are not going to put down their own interests to serve the hive. We are a bunch of cooperating, but ultimately independent agents, who act in their own benefit.
It is up to the business owner to keep their employee activity in check. Does that mean giving them work to do? Checking on the progress of their tasks? Checking on their methodology and software stack sustainability? Making sure there are no single points of failure for the business? Making sure the "IT know-how" of the business is preserved when a person leaves? ALL OF THE ABOVE!
When a business owner can't do these periodic checks themselves, they're free to hire someone that will do this for them.
But the idea that individual developers should care about what happens to the business after they leave is just preposterous.
Also, the entire "resume driven development" thing is absurd. This has always happened in software development. People care a lot about what their resume will look like in 5 years. It's perfectly normal and the business benefits too ("we use modern tools, come work for us"). It doesn't mean the business should allow needless "shiny new thing" syndrome to thrive, but you should watch out to not stomp out innovation or you might find yourself unable to hire talented devs because no one wants to work on your shitty "php with jquery" web app.