Publicly credit your employees (opens in new tab)

Microsoft and a lot of other developers used to add "credits" or easter eggs to their programs. At least for Microsoft it was the customers that complained about them. In retrospect they likely went too far incorporating full fledged games complete with DOOM style 3D engines [1], but it was a good morale booster for the developers and a chance to add some culture to their work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwg9eLHZZRo

Possible Problem: My dad was a structural engineer and made some very nice brochures with photos of all his awesome employees on it. His competitors used the information to poach them.

humans.txt already exists. http://humanstxt.org/

A few years ago, I spent on some time on spinning this issue around and giving employees a way to request public validation of their contributions from their employers. Sort of asking your manager to give you a public endorsement of your contributions every six months or so. I talked to a few managers and every one said companies wouldn't accept such a thing.

Any novel thoughts on how to get around that obstacle ?

The reason is often they don't want to get their employees poached.

Sometimes there just isn't enough money yet (or reasons to believe that the money is best used else where) and they haven't had the time/luxury/discipline/etc. to make sure someone leaving doesn't cause major issues.

How many people here actually read the credits for a movie? I mean, I've worked on movies and I don't read the credits. Would anyone even read credits for software if they existed?

I guess if it's just a token of appreciation for employees and it only matters to them, sure. From the company's perspective, I don't see it being much of anything more than a poach list of their best employees though.

If individuals want public exposure, they should be allowed to write about their work for a company blog.

This becomes useless if you have a common name. Was it me, or the famous author with my name, or the person who worked on visual studio Google recruiters think they're emailing when they email me?

The screen actors guild fixes this problem by requiring all members to adopt unique names, but there is no such organization in our field.

How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.