A developer built a critical application for his company but got no recognition or pay for it. The speaker explores why developers stay silent about this theft and what happens when you try to protect your work through deliberate complexity.
Hello friends. On the WhatsApp that I share all the time, I received a message from someone who works in a company. And this is what he told me. He told me that he works in a company and then we discovered that he had developed himself, he had coded himself. Because in a previous life, I want to say, or rather in his career, he was a developer. And then he left DevOps and then he changed. He did project management, he did a lot of other things, he left the DevOps world, but. But he is someone who lives like he breathes. And suddenly he arrives in this company like that. During a conversation, he discovers that he has coded himself. He wants to be nice and tells them, yeah, you have this problem. I can probably solve it by creating an application. He creates a small application. Later on this application will become big because he will work on it. He will work on it in the evenings, he will work on it on the weekends. He will spend a lot of time, especially when he is constantly being called to ask for help. Oh please, can't you add this feature or anything like that? And so the guy finds himself in an absolutely atrocious situation, which is that he is developing this application that is starting to become very time consuming. At the same time he is not paid extra for it, and at the same time he is not even reducing the workload on the rest. So he has his title, he has his title of, of. He has his title of his role, he has his salary, he has of tasks that will occupy him all day. And he is asked to develop, to continue to, to increase an increasingly complex, increasingly large application and to maintain it. And at some point this application becomes central to the functioning of the company. That's terrible. That is to say, literally, we are losing him without knowing. We are taking from him without knowing, without paying him for it, without the slightest recognition, no recognition, neither financial nor in terms of title, nor anything at all. So this is an absolutely catastrophic situation. Well, he is thinking of leaving the company. What I advised him, I, I often advise, uh, well, what I am going to tell you is not pretty pretty, but hey, the corporate environment is like that, you know, it is not a pretty environment. Anyway, if you want something pretty, I don't know, I don't know what there is on earth that is pretty. It must exist. I don't have any examples off the top of my head. If I have some that come to mind, I will share them with you. I will not hesitate. But right now I am recording a video. You tell me a pretty place. There, you see, I Am stuck. I am having trouble. So I was telling you that one of the techniques I recommend to deal with this situation is that the guy wants to leave the company. But on the other hand, he doesn't want to leave just like that, because he also feels like he's on an ejection seat. Because once he's developed this application, well, now the company might even be thinking of reselling it, maybe something, and they want to get rid of him. So that's what you do in these situations. You have to do what's called hard coding. What does that mean? I'll give you an example. Lets say the application has an invoicing module that invoices customers. Okay. But as long as the menu is there, you choose the year, you choose the day, the month, the year. In terms of the code, where does the year come from when you code? Well, the year is dynamically generated. That means that, for example, the code will say, what date is today? Take the date, check the year part, and it will insert it into the menu. What does that mean? It means it's 2024. If we go to 2024, what will happen? 25, what will happen automatically when we arrive on the application, we Click in there, 2025 appears as if by magic on the menu. And practically everything works like that. We want to add a department, we're going to add a category, we're going to add something like that. And what do we do? Well, there's a button. We can add all that. Well, what I recommend is doing some hard coding. What does that mean? That means, for example, creating the menu and then in the code a constant 2024, and then reusing this constant every time we need the year. There you go. It's coded in a hard way. Yeah, it's hard coded in the program. There's no dynamism there. As long as you're in the company. You arrive in December, you're still there, you're still satisfied with your work and that it's going well. You take the code, you add a new constant, year 2025, you manually put it in the menu, you recompile it, you release a new version, and there you go, you say, yeah, you fixed a few things, you optimized two or three things, and that's it. So what you're going to do is you're going to manually add a certain number of elements each time. If you leave, I know someone who's in exactly this situation. She left. They're crying. I assure you that they're crying. The Application collapsed after he left. So he fired him. He left. It's fine. He's giving his notice. There's no contact with the company. Anyway, he has the source code. He threw it away or something like that. Or he took it with him. Anyway, since he's not officially the company's developer, there's no place where the code is maintained and all that. It's just that it was done in a hurry. The program practically fell off the truck. They're just happy to use it. And then he leaves. What happens? January 1st comes and bam. January 1st comes a few months later. It's going to be two months, three months, six months later, January 1st of next year arrives and then, oh, we have the start of the school year on the second or third Monday, January 2nd or third, and then suddenly we have, oh yeah, but there's a problem with the application. Oh, it doesn't work. Look, I can't put the new Year there. Oh, look closely. Reboot, reboot, reboot windows. As the Indian support people say, you have to reinstall windows, you reinstall windows and that fixes everything. That's it. The application is dead. The application is finished without you. It's over. He has to redo it from scratch because everything is hard coded in the application. There you go. It's one of the techniques to preserve its sound a little bit. You don't win, that's all. Because they want to steal it from you. So if you have the right. It's like when you have a bike, you put it somewhere and put a chain on it. That's how it is. It's the same. You put a chain, you put an anti theft device in it. So you put an anti theft device in your application. Well, this is one of the techniques that I gave here, hard coding, but there are others. But hard coding is quite violent because it's very difficult, very difficult to bypass. For example, they print invoices with last year and then each time with the pen, they correct it like this with the pen or they Photoshop it. Each time they print an invoice, you know, in PDF and then they open it with Photoshop and then they correct it a little by putting this. They can, you know, but, well, it becomes quite annoying after a while. There you have it. Thank you my friends, for listening so far. And we try to survive as best we can in the business world.
