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Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

Been there

Been there. There was this old fashioned developer in one of the companies I worked for a decade ago who never understood nor embraced version control (we were talking of SVN at the time, not even git). Luckily that wasn't the case for all the others developers in the company. But when it came to the projects he owned, I witnessed several scenes along the lines of "hey, customer X has an issue with your component Y, what version do they have?" He had a spreadsheet where he kept track of the versions used by every customer. Once identified the version, he would open (no joke) a drawer in his desk and pick the right USB stick with that version on it. I've always wondered whether this overhead was a worth price to pay for not wanting to learn a couple of SVN commands.

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FO

This is amazing. I can so well imagine a bright young hire joining that team, helpfully offering to "setup this thing called git" only to be laughed out of the meeting by all the "senior" staff.

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IC

My first job out of college, way back in the 90's, I had to "train" an entire department on how to use CVS. This wasn't a startup. This was a billion dollar, established company with 1000's of employees.

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AL

He was in essence doing manual version and release control - just.. like you would in 1990 with floppy disks.

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CY

Perhaps he was more concerned with job control, and saw centralized code as a detriment to his job security

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