IT companies should be forced to publicly credit developers
This one weird trick could significantly improve the industry.
“Adventure” might be the lamest name one could come up for a video game, but that is the name what Warren Robinett decided to use for his Atari 2600 classic released in 1980. Thankfully, Mr. Robinett’s creativity wasn’t as stunted as the title of the game suggests when Atari decided to omit crediting the creator’s of their games. This lead to a creative solution of hiding his name to a hard-to-access level of the game itself and thus the first video game Easter egg was laid.
Eventually, the hunched-over creatures in the cubicles managed to beat the control-obsessed rulers of yesteryear and it is now customary to have lengthy credit rolls at the end of every single commercially produced video game. This actually is an oddity within the IT industry since vast majority of software has no publicly available list of creators. The only real exception besides video games is the open-source community and even there it is only a side-effect of the development model and not really something anyone seemed to deliberately consider at any point.
What effect does this have? The primary consequence is that the creator’s of the most widely used software today are a complete mystery to the global audience. When Microsoft Teams craps out again and makes us miss out on the important memes our colleagues tried to share with us, we can’t send severed horse heads to the developers since we don’t know who they are. Nobody is worried that working on Microsoft Teams makes them radioactive in the job market since nobody can go and sit through the full credits for different Microsoft products and see how worthless their effort was. In the other hand, if someone went and actually fixed that huge waste of human and environmental resources, nobody would ever know who made it happen.
Omitting developer credits essentially works both ways: developers who are doing their part and have enough organizational power to steer projects are not being credited fairly for their good work, but it also allows developers to hide behind the curtain of mystery set up by the company. This of course has the added benefit for the company that it is harder to poach good employees from their ranks.
The second major consequence is that software that actually has public credits becomes more valuable for it’s creators. Being able to showcase open-source projects seems to be more prestigious in the eyes recruiters than claiming that you worked on this and that in a random software company. Even if the proprietary software you worked on was an order of magnitude more complex than almost any piece of open source software available. In certain circles it would actually be a good career move to sleepwalk in your day job and then use up all your free-time effort to pad up your GitHub account.
Making it legally required for companies to publicly credit developers on a per project basis would provide more information for the job market and in general be a net-positive for the industry. It would improve recruitment and make people more invested in what they create instead of min-maxing on cool sounding company names and titles.