Bob Wyman decided to descend into the mudpit yesterday. PubSub is running into funding problems, and he addressed that by publicly blaming one of the co-founders. I have no way of evaluating what he's saying about Ismail in this post; it just looks like an ugly fight brought outside where we can all see it.

Having said that, Bob does make an excellent point that too many managers forget:

I believe that by the time we go through bankruptcy proceedings, we won't have any employees and frankly, a software company without the employees that developed its software is worthless. Our assets will have a much higher value if we have the employees available, thus, the best course at this time is to sell our assets, trademarks, etc. to cover the outstanding debt and make our employees available to the purchaser.

Too many managers have the idea that developers are fully interchangeable parts (witness the "send maintenance offshore" idea). What they don't seem to get is two things:

• It's not like a factory: developers are not fully replaceable gear wheels
• Code is complex, and sending it to a bunch of people who've never seen it before is not a great solution

It takes time for new developers to come up to speed when they have people to lean on - it takes longer when all they have is the code. If PubSub does go down, and the employees leave - the value of the code there will approach zero almost immediately.