
Publicly credit your employees - superted
http://www.superted.io/business/2017/07/07/publicly-credit-your-employees.html
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slededit
Microsoft and a lot of other developers used to add "credits" or easter eggs
to their programs. At least for Microsoft it was the customers that complained
about them. In retrospect they likely went too far incorporating full fledged
games complete with DOOM style 3D engines [1], but it was a good morale
booster for the developers and a chance to add some culture to their work.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwg9eLHZZRo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwg9eLHZZRo)

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Kipters
As far as I know, they've since banned such easter eggs because of compliance
rules (US federal laws require that all features of a product must be
documented for a product to be considered for government use)

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slededit
They could have documented the Easter egg as a workaround. But the real issue
was in places where things like Solitaire were removed from the computers
employees were playing these games in Excel and other apps which couldn't be
removed.

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benjohnson
Possible Problem: My dad was a structural engineer and made some very nice
brochures with photos of all his awesome employees on it. His competitors used
the information to poach them.

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johansch
So he wasn't paying them enough?

(But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for
employers.)

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tomjakubowski
> (But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for
> employers.)

From an employer's perspective it's great so long as everyone else is doing it
and not them :-)

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joeframbach
humans.txt already exists. [http://humanstxt.org/](http://humanstxt.org/)

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holtalanm
i was going to mention this. +1

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scatter
A few years ago, I spent on some time on spinning this issue around and giving
employees a way to request public validation of their contributions from their
employers. Sort of asking your manager to give you a public endorsement of
your contributions every six months or so. I talked to a few managers and
every one said companies wouldn't accept such a thing.

Any novel thoughts on how to get around that obstacle ?

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0xCMP
The reason is often they don't want to get their employees poached.

Sometimes there just isn't enough money yet (or reasons to believe that the
money is best used else where) and they haven't had the
time/luxury/discipline/etc. to make sure someone leaving doesn't cause major
issues.

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carlosdp
How many people here actually read the credits for a movie? I mean, I've
worked on movies and I don't read the credits. Would anyone even read credits
for software if they existed?

I guess if it's just a token of appreciation for employees and it only matters
to them, sure. From the company's perspective, I don't see it being much of
anything more than a poach list of their best employees though.

If individuals want public exposure, they should be allowed to write about
their work for a company blog.

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elcritch
Huh, I tend to read them. At least in the sense of "I wonder if John Smith of
production assistants #2 was the funny guy, or if Sarah on animation #12
helped make the second scene". And sometimes you get fun post credit scenes.
But feels like a way to give a props to people I may never even meet.

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toast0
This becomes useless if you have a common name. Was it me, or the famous
author with my name, or the person who worked on visual studio Google
recruiters think they're emailing when they email me?

The screen actors guild fixes this problem by requiring all members to adopt
unique names, but there is no such organization in our field.

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HarryHirsch
How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to
stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of
appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the
employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the
medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

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mcny
> How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to
> stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of
> appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the
> employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as
> the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

You're absolutely right that we do not expect to stay with one employer for
life. Maybe I misunderstood it but it seems like the point is that because we
don't stay with the same employers for our whole lives, the original article
equates it to working on a movie or a television show where we credit people.
Maybe we can even create some sort of an IMdb as a who's who of software
development. It would be so cool, don't you think?

