[lowercased]

If people knew about it, sure.

I was tasked with 'finishing up' someone else's work who was away on vacation. All his code was in sourcesafe... locked to just him. And he was away for another 9 days with no cell phone or email (not really a big thing in 1999) and... I was immediately getting pestering emails from the PM. "When is this getting finished? Ben said it was nearly done, just needed a few more bits.". There was pretty much nothing I could do. VSS was something he'd set up on a server that only he had a password to, and... no one had thought to have him to coordinate with anyone before he left on vacation for 2 weeks.

That was one of the first times I felt "everyone else just thinks we're interchangeable cogs". Possibly the first time. If one of the PMs took vacation, or one of the accounting folks, there was some defined handoff process "to keep things running smoothly". No one seemed to give a toss about "devs" in that case.