For the most part I've kept this blog separate from my current career as a software engineer, as well as from my prior career as an academic. It is separated from them also in being mine - what I write here, to the best of my understanding of my situation, does belong to me, hence that copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
In my paying work, I'm used to creating things that are not my own. In graduate school, even things I wrote that were mine initially, would be assigned, often exclusively, to whoever published them. If I ever wanted to commercialize anything I came up with, however unlikely that would be as a theoretician, it would have to go through a department of my university, with them receiving a significant share of any subsequent revenue. As a software engineer, the code I write as part of my job is "work for hire", meaning that I don't own it - my employer does. There was a brief respite where I created an indie game that was mine and that I sold a handful of copies of, but that was the exception.
This puts me in a position that is different from that of many of the people who create the things I talk about in this blog. Many fiction authors retain control over the work they write, and of how it may be used, and role-playing game designers, especially the indie ones, also are dealing with intellectual property that they own, and their control over it is foundational to their ability to continue making money off of it, and to their prestige as designers. Most of my colleagues and I, on the other hand, are paid money to create something for someone else. Our creation is explicitly alienated from us not just in the basic sense that anything is alienated when we put it outside ourselves as a means to an end, but in the sense that we relinquish control over it pretty much as soon as it leaves our fingers. The practicality is a bit different, as software engineering does require a lot of back-and-forth, return to old code to fix or improve it, et cetera, but in terms of ownership it is one and the same if I go to my own code from six months ago to fix a bug, or to someone else's code - or, more realistically, to code I contributed a bit to six months ago and has been changed further since then.
And yet, as time goes on, something about us grows and isn't given away. It's not just the credit - assuming our names appear somewhere, more often so in academia, less often so in the software industry. It's the very fact that we've created these things, and the understanding we gained when creating them, that cannot be alienated from us. I can't sell or give away the fact that I can program, that I do have ever-increasing understanding of the programming languages and technologies I have used, and of whatever algorithms I came up with. That I have learned and discussed, and gained skills - at most I can be barred from using some or all of that in particular situations, but they can't be torn out of me the way that specific programs I've written were pulled from my grasp.
Qualifications are similar. I have a PhD. That is something that at most could be taken away from someone if fraud was discovered - but that would just mean that the fact that the PhD was achieved was never quite true. For qualifications that need to be renewed, like a legal or medical license, the situation is a bit less stable - but even then, it's not like any of us can sell our qualifications directly. I can't go to the intellectual property market and find someone willing to pay a certain amount of money, accept it, and then suddenly that person has a PhD and I don't, or maybe they have a duplicate of my PhD. We can demand payment for the use of our qualifications, effectively renting them out, but we cannot be cut out of the equation entirely without engaging in something fraudulent.
Nevertheless, there is something nice about having some creations that are alienable but still belong to me. It's easier to let people read a text than explain an understanding.
