At least at the Fortune 500 level, there are only toxic environments. And job security has never been weaker.

Ownership of the IP, as it were, is certainly true, but usually with these tools, most of the battle is documenting it, training people, answering questions, etc., and if you aren't motivated to do that it's very hard to make it happen.

Boss-man actually has a very difficult time turning legal theoretic right into actual deliverables.

They can't force you to share what they don't know about or don't understand.

It's not about that, it's about the incentive...

But if you made it at work, it’s not your intellectual property.

I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.

But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.

It does seem like a highly antagonistic way of working or perhaps I'm just naive.

If your only goal is to maintain a performance lead on your peers, you either need to gain and keep an advantage or find ways to actively make your coworkers disadvantaged (or both). And if you're already doing 1) then 2) isn't a far stretch.

> would you like to work on a team full of people like you?

If their team is already like this, what choice do they have? It's a prisoners dilemma where everyone else is defecting and I'm the sole cooperator.

IMO the onus for solving this is on the business owner, either through establishing a knowledge sharing culture or more comprehensive performance evaluation that rewards these innovations.

> I don't think this way because I like to collaborate.

Nice passive aggressive dig!

Yeah, well, I challenge them to do that. In the meantime, I'll keep it to myself.

I love open source, but you are correct in identifying it as a very similar problem, though it's more a problem with software licensing than source code being publically available. Usually the argument is made that FOSS ends up as free labor, which is true in a lot of ways, but I see FOSS devaluing software as a whole. When software is open and libre, that sends a psychological signal that the software isn't that valuable. There would still be FOSS in a world where even projects like React charged a licensing fee to big organizations, but in that case there would be more choice between YOLO with free software or paying for quality software; as token expenses have proven, many companies could absolutely pay for the latter many times over. In terms of specifically open source, however, companies get a bit of a loophole in that their own employees (or LLM of choice) can be "inspired* by the source code and clone aspects of commercial software. This has the effect of devaluing the skill of individual software engineers to being glorified script kiddies.

I refuse to use LLMs and don't have a job, so I'm just some guy.

What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc. This attitude of "your job is to deliver value for the customer, anything else is a distraction, and if you share your hard-earned value-delivery techniques with others then you are a sucker" - this is new, and very disconcerting.

I understand there's not much we can do to stop the cyberpunk dystopia, but do we have to leap in head-first?

Do y'all non-sharers not have equity in your companies?

Oh, they would be, but the benefits of AI aren't evenly spread like peanut butter. I subscribe to the 'ai as amplifier' POV, so the fast get faster, and generally productive people don't get squeezed or the scrutiny the laggards do IME.

Contrast to remote work where the benefit was extended to all regardless of performance, thus becoming a large target for management to cut.

I think the talk about management & capital demanding ROI will be the inflection point to watch, as a downstream effect could be AI haves & have-nots, depending on open weight models' competitiveness and local capability relative to the SOTA models.