Early VCS was clunky and slow. If one dev checked out some files, another dev couldn't work on them. People wouldn't check them back in quickly, they'd "hoard" them. Then merges introduced all sorts of tooling difficulties.
People's contributions were now centrally tracked and could be easily turned into metrics, and people worried (sometimes correctly) management would weaponize this.
It was seen by many as a top-down bureaucratic Big Brother mandate that slowed things down for no good reason and interfered with developers' autonomy and productivity. Or even if it had some value, it wasn't worth the price devs paid in using it.
This attitude wasn't universal of course. Other devs thought it was a necessary and helpful tool. But the point is that tons of devs were against it.
It really wasn't until git that VCS became "cool", with a feeling of being developer-led rather than management-led. But even then there was significant resistance to its new complexity, in how complicated it was to reason about its distributed nature, and the difficulty of its interface.
Early VCS was clunky and slow. If one dev checked out some files, another dev couldn't work on them. People wouldn't check them back in quickly, they'd "hoard" them. Then merges introduced all sorts of tooling difficulties.
People's contributions were now centrally tracked and could be easily turned into metrics, and people worried (sometimes correctly) management would weaponize this.
It was seen by many as a top-down bureaucratic Big Brother mandate that slowed things down for no good reason and interfered with developers' autonomy and productivity. Or even if it had some value, it wasn't worth the price devs paid in using it.
This attitude wasn't universal of course. Other devs thought it was a necessary and helpful tool. But the point is that tons of devs were against it.
It really wasn't until git that VCS became "cool", with a feeling of being developer-led rather than management-led. But even then there was significant resistance to its new complexity, in how complicated it was to reason about its distributed nature, and the difficulty of its interface.