This is a story about my time at Broadcom and a warning to my peers.
tl;dr
Never donate your own code for free to corporations.
See in my time at said company, I had a lot of significant contributions and one of the biggest one in my opinion was me in my spare time driving the QA automation forward. See, I wrote the Integration testing framework that upon my departure was used by the entire business unit as well as all our internal services we were delivering. The qa team even named it after me: STEF (Software Testing Enterprise Framework).
I want the reader to be aware from the get go:
To Be Precise.
I didn’t just write it. I was the sole developer maintaining it.
More than 90% of that code base, and 100% of the initial commits, was written outside of work, without anything but a pat on the back given to me for my efforts. This framework was my passion project, because I disliked how testing was done internally (good old ClickOps). At the time I was even saying things to myself:
- This is not work, I’m doing it for my own betterment.
- I’m doing this because I like it.
- it’s to learn.
And all of these statements are true still to this day. These are not the issue.
See I’m a huge believer in investing in one self. What bothers me is not that I donated my work, but rather that I didn’t open source it from the get go.
What possessed me at the time to not post it externally, but internally only, I don’t know. Not only that but I was given the option back in the day to open source it, but was stopped by “upper management”.
As I talked about in my tracking and security note, I like to keep an online persona, meaning sharing my professional opinions as well as open sourcing projects I consider beneficial to my career. This one is a missed opportunity, that would have had a nice place in my portfolio.
So, that is my one and only regret. My own code, donated to a corporation, without any accreditation. And I am left a little bit bitter, but also smarter for the future.
Closing Thoughts 💭
This should not be misunderstood. You should be a valuable employee at whatever job you are working. Innovate, think outside the box and improve, but if you are doing it on the side, post your research first. Own it. Learn from my mistakes.