I'm having mixed feelings about a situation in my workplace. I’m getting the impression that a colleague wants to claim my work as his, but I’m also suspecting it might be unfair of me to think so.
We have a software product that needs to be tailored for each costumer. I was in the dev team that created the first version of this product with the help of an external consultant. We had very poor management from non-coder bosses and the small team was made of juniors.
The consultant enforced a mix between strong ownership and collective ownership. Most modules were supposed to be modified only by the responsible person; with very few exceptions. However, there were a few integrating pieces that needed to be modified by everyone (with everyone’s knowledge).
Afterwards, a new project has begun, with no consultant this time, and that initiates a retailoring of the product, where many modules may need very small or no modifications, while a few new modules might need to be created or removed. However, I was assigned to a different project, and is not foreseen that I would be working on this retailoring. My colleagues now have copied all the code files to a new repository, thus the commits I’ve made in the earlier project can be seen only in the old repository (which likely no one will check). We had standards for headers in the files, which included the name of the person doing each relevant modification to a file. But even with small modifications, my colleagues are “resetting” these changelogs, thus removing my name. The same goes for the documentation.
I’m not sure if I should raise a discussion about it, and if I do so, how should I proceed.
One of my colleagues has more than once presented things done with meaningful help of others as his own (he never explicitly claimed to have done it alone, but doesn’t mention whoever was not in the room) and often says “We did A and B” when he should have said “Joe did A and B”. So there is a trust issue on this matter.
The concern I have is that all code I’ve developed in the past years will now be seen as if it was fully developed by my colleagues. The boss having very little visibility and no interest in managing people does not offer a good counterbalance to this concern. I understand the code is the company’s property and not mine, but the impression is that I’ll lose all credit I should have from developing it within the next year. This is more critical on how I would be seen by new employees or by (possibly) a new boss outsourced by the company.