My Boss wants all my VBA coding disclosed before termination

[MrMarlon]

Hi team, I have worked with this company two years and business is not going well with this company, ant to make this story short the company will be laying-off a group of employees and I am on that list.
My boss has always been very impress with my job performance as I have through the years and with the help of the brilliant people from this forum, managed to automate every single office task in this department otherwise would be very time consuming or hiring extra personnel would be necessary to accomplished it.

He wants every single line of code I have been able to put together to disclose it in very detailed so the next guy that comes in will be able to operate and do the job in the same way.
I need to know how far can a company legally force you to disclose that information or "intellectual property" so they can re use it to their advantage the minute I walk out the door. I will appreciate all the MrExcel community comments in regards to this issue.

 

[Andrew Fergus]

Hi

There have been some good responses so far and I won't reiterate those but I do have a couple of comments.

First up, sorry to hear you are losing your job and good luck with finding your next!

Secondly, you mentioned "He wants every single line of code I have been able to put together to disclose it in very detailed so the next guy that comes in will be able to operate and do the job in the same way."

If I am understanding this correctly, he wants every single line of code documented or commented on? Wow. That could take weeks or months depending on how many lines of code there are. Do you know how many lines there are? Can you quote a figure of say 5000 or more to your boss? What your boss has displayed is a total misunderstanding of VBA or programming. Your boss expects you to comment or document a line like this:
For i = 1 to 10
when the average programmer could work that line out for themselves.

I also suspect there won't be a 'next guy' either for some time or even at all. It also sounds like your boss intends that someone already resident in the office will attempt to make amendments to the code. A little knowledge is a very dangerous thing!

So given the time pressures you were under to write the code :wink: nothing was documented at the time, so to now provide comments for all x thousand lines of code I think you have just bought yourself some breathing space to find your next job. Meanwhile, if you don't finish in time then I guess your boss should have thought about that before deciding to axe you. And as jm14 mentioned, you may be happy to come back at twice the price to help later. All with a smile on your face and 100% politeness of course!

Good luck
Andrew

 

[Err]

I had to train my replacements in India before I was laid off.

The bottom line is that you don't have to do anything that you don't want to do. However -you do have to quit if they try to make you do something that you won't.

 

[MrMarlon]

Thas was very encoraging Greg, Thanks!.
Moving forward:
I wonder, since VBA is so similar to Visual Basics if it'd be a good idea to learn and start a new career based on VB programmimg? I believe this is probably a wider scope carreer, isn't it?.
Is there an application out there I would need to buy to get started?

Thanks for your comments.

 

[Greg Truby]

...I wonder, since VBA is so similar to Visual Basics if it'd be a good idea to learn and start a new career based on VB programmimg? I believe this is probably a wider scope carreer, isn't it? Is there an application out there I would need to buy to get started?...
~MrMarlon

The subject of how to parley Excel or Excel+VBA skills into a career or a career enhancement comes up reasonably frequently. Scan the first 20 or so pages of posts in the lounge and/or this forum and I'm sure you'll come across a minimum of two, maybe even five or six, threads on this topic with posts from guys (or gals) with very varied backgrounds offering their experiences.

 

[MrMarlon]

Excellent tip Greg.
I have to thank you all for such grate feedback and comments, I knew asking here was my best option as this has always been the only place when looking for professional and intellectual resources in the internet at any time.

THANK YOU.

 

[Thorin]

I can highly recommend not "burning your bridges", I was made redundant a year and a half ago, and although I felt like letting them know how I felt, I kept it all to myself and continued doing the best job I could right through until I left.

On my last day the Finance Director (who was the guy who made me redundant), phoned me to wish me luck and thanked me for my professional attitude.

A year later I was job hunting again, the FD who had made me redundant contacted me to offer me another job, this only happened because of not "burning my bridges".

A lesson well learnt for me.

 

[Johnny C]

Over the years I have inherited a lot of complex macros and formulas. The easy to pick up ones leave you with an impression of someone who knew what they were doing, had the best intentions, and someone you'd recommend.

There have also been a lot of bad ones; the guy before me here who wrote a lot of complex financial calculations removed all indentations and replaced all his variable names with single or double letters in the order in which they appeared in the macro (A,B,C,D,E,F...). It was unmaintainable and would have taken so long to unravel and figure out everything that it was quicker to start again from scratch. I wouldn't recommend that chap to anyone.

 

[NateO]

Re: My Boss wants all my VBA coding disclosed before termina

Hi team, I have worked with this company two years and business is not going well with this company, ant to make this story short the company will be laying-off a group of employees and I am on that list.

First off, I'd like to say I'm sorry. This is a difficult reality to stare in the face of.

Now it's time to be a professional. Get your affairs in order, at least you know it's coming; some of us don't see the proverbial bus we're about to be thrown under.

Code is code. I wouldn't take any extra efforts to comment line by line or anything of the sort. I also would not be bothered to convolute it, either. There's no point in wasting such efforts...

I think that a lot of us 'hardcore' developers waste too much time worrying about reverse engineering, really. Who cares? 999/1000 won't understand a thing you've done, no matter how well you've documented your code, or how carefully you've written it.

Anyone who's ever employed me, God bless them, they own anything and everything I have ever done for them; I wish them the best with it, really. I moved away from scrambling code a long time ago... I used to be a master at this, until I realized it doesn’t matter, really; it's wasted effort. I'd rather they can follow my efforts and replicate it, while my confidence is not strong.

My advice? Just smile and move along. Chalk it up as an experience, take your skills and create elsewhere. They can and should take your projects, but no one can take away what you 'know'.

Keep being passionate about what you do, while layering on skill-sets, and you'll succeed. Passion doesn't just drive projects, it drives people, and given a passionate group of people, organizations move!

Bon chance, Monsieur.

 

[MrMarlon]

Yes! NateO, I had to here it from you...

Thanks for your input, will defenatly keep always in mind.