
Ask HN: Is your company's code open to all employees - imagiko
What considerations go in when a company decides to restrict codebase access to respective teams? I cannot see any code another team is working on. How common is this practice? What can one gauge about the company culture if this is the case?
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jetti
Where I am at now we can see all the repos for all projects in the company
regardless of team. The only pre-req is to be added to the company's github
organization. We have a lot of cross team work, though, and I have worked on a
few services that aren't related to my team and it would be a pain to have to
request access.

At my last job, however, everything was locked down and you had to request
access to just about every repo. It was a pain in the ass and there was no
real valid reason to do so.

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mytailorisrich
Source code is important intellectual property and trade secret.

In general it is simply good practice to only make this sort of information
available to employees who need it to carry out their jobs. It is not a
problem because there is usually no reason to study the code of another
product/module/team/whatever, and if there is a reason then access can be
granted, and is granted.

If your side needs to interact with another team's code and you cannot see
their source code it at least forces everyone to have properly documented
APIs.

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imagiko
Assuming your developers have malicious intent is a bit strange for me
personally. But I get that some companies may have this structure in place.

~~~
mytailorisrich
This does not assume anything. That's the point.

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shaniamama
My experience: Went to work at a startup transitioning to the next stage. When
hired I was told everything is available to all employees, 'there are no
secrets here'. I quickly found that most was locked away...and then noticed
the same in many places. That and what comes with it led to my leaving. When I
left I went back for a pseudo-exit interview with the CEO and he actually told
me he had been screwing my team for the past year. In essence what I found was
mostly lies. The lies began in interview (everything open to everyone) and
continued until I left (continuing to hire based on things that don't exist at
the company...like HR). My take: if you are told one thing and find it
different, look around at more things.

