An Impromptu Interview about Sovereign Software Development

From the article:

the kind of authoritarian socialism you find in corporations that follow this lazy share-everything ideology, doesn’t have positive effects. For those of you who have lived in these miniature dystopias for any length of time, you know it does nothing more than breed contention, dead-locks, bickering, politics, resentment, and misery — while at the same time minimizing team output and introducing unnecessary project risks and maximizing turn over.

I have found this to be COMPLETELY untrue. The real cause of the negativity the author speaks of isn't sharing: it's being unable to separate your code from yourself. You are not your code. An alteration to your code is not an affront to your dignity. If anything, the "dead-locks, bickering, politics, resentment, and misery" he speaks of are fostered more by feudalism: if changing a piece of code requires petitioning some baron, that will create those political, bickering filled deadlocks.

In fact, I would claim that staying with the same piece of code for an extended period of time is more likely to corrupt you than anything else: I rarely if ever work on the same code for longer than a few weeks at a time, and then move on to a different component, and once I'm weeks away from a given merge, I've forgotten most of the details. Meanwhile, everyone else is doing the same thing. Our developers have extreme tunnel vision that lets us focus on what we're doing without being overwhelmed by changes going on around us, and we have architects, tech leads, and product owners to ensure that our tunnel vision doesn't corrupt the project.

In this situation, I have no "code ownership" at all, and I don't want it. Having to preserve ownership of my fiefdom, defend it from rival lords, and keep the Crown in good graces would all produce a colossal amount of headache that I don't have when I bid my code a fond farewell after the merge to master and let it live its own life.

/r/programming Thread Parent Link - medium.com