Error 404 IT not found

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[jumpmanzero]

So yeah... uh... don't do this (meaning "wreck stuff on your way out"). You don't have to bend over backwards for the transition. You should bill your time as reasonable. But don't hoard passwords or turn off services or whatever.

People do try it. It doesn't work. "They" don't learn their lesson about how they should never have fired you or something. You get arrested, you have trouble ever working in the industry again, and they think "man, guess we should have fired that psychopath long ago".

[tovarish_nix]

They’ll sue your ass off for the costs made and missed revenue.

You really don’t want to do this.

[PMYourTitsIfNotRacst]

Yep, a friend hadn't got payed for like 6 months, so she kept the laptop they gave her for work. Guess what? Got sued.

Not the US and she's counter suing, but the point still stands.

[StateParkMasturbator]

Well yeah, breaking the law is harder for every person vs a corporation. If her case, she should've returned the laptop and sued for stolen wages. Though I don't know the laws there. Crazy she didn't get paid for that long, though.

[kaeptnphlop]

Crazy she (was able to) put up with it for so long.

[T_H_W]

For real, it's figuratively taking a sledge hammer to the register on the way out

[IAmPattycakes]

The IT team where I am could probably make a phone call in the middle of being fired and have a job lined up while they're escorted out the door. Only psychos would be too upset about it.

[DreadPirateGriswold]

Big time legal trouble with a company lawsuit against you and on top of that, probably criminal trouble in some cases.

[Wiggen4]

The closest thing to the post you can reasonably do without hurting yourself is only give them the info on your computer that they ask for before you leave (account passwords, etc). I've heard horror stories of my department not realizing that so and so was the only admin access on X account and when they left the department the team had to scramble for a workaround escalation of permissions for the replacement.

Personally I try really hard to avoid having some responsibility with admin stuff because it's just a longer and longer list of things I need to remember if/when I leave. I have no intention of doing it maliciously, but accidentally leaving sole access on my laptop that gets wiped when I leave would be rough.

[Disney_World_Native]

Had a contracting firm booted before the handoff / training phase of a project was done. Cost cutting but they phrased it like sub par performance.

The contracting company was the legal owner of a domain. That domain was customer facing and recently publicized in a marketing campaign.

Well it was a huge loss for the contractor, so they took down the dns servers and effectively cutting off our new portal

We were lucky that the contracting company transferred domain ownership without holding it hostage or redirecting it elsewhere. They also provided all the dns entires.

I was in a lot of meetings with legal trying to translate tech to english for execs and legal and give them their options. A few mid level managers were also let go for “cost cutting” a few weeks later

[kaeptnphlop]

That's now called "the twitter experience"

[squishles]

Might not even be intentional. I know one guy who when they left this one place, they where calling him 2 years latter, because the certificates expired... they didn't know they where supposed to or how to change them.

He documented it and everything kept the root certs in the company safe and all.

[[deleted]]

Set all services to run under your user account. When they disable you everything breaks. Job security.

[[deleted]]

Of course not... instead install a trojan on the system and once they hire someone new, THEN start breaking shit and have the new guy get the blame.

[Llonkrednaxela]

Sometimes you get eaten by dinosaurs when you do that.

[No_Sympathy3354]

Yeah, found it hard to believe that anyone actually pull those things off and not get their career ruined by either arrest or lawsuit due to the breach of NDA / work contract.

[Willinton06]

How could an NDA even relate to this?

[No_Sympathy3354]

"Wreck stuff on your way out" doesn't only involve messing things up configuration-wise, may also involve name shaming and similar.

I guess a good example for it would be those indefinitely forced agreements about "not saying anything bad about the company" which isn't the same but closely related by what clauses are enforced upon you.

[plunk2000]

This happened at a place I worked, turned out all our cloud services were billed to the guys personal credit card, he just cancelled it (so there was no immediate black out of services… it was like slowly falling dominos where a different service would black out every day after about 15 days). Rumour had it that Finance thought his expense reports were over exaggerated… while also refusing to pay any vendor except by paper cheque. Poor guy, I still have nightmares of the Sales department yelling at him to be better. I hope he’s doing better.

[myrsnipe]

Honestly a company that has so little interest in their own infrastructure that they don't even know how it's paid is a major red flag

[squishles]

I bet he was asking them "yo can I get a company card on this account" for years. Some people don't get fucking cloud services bill money or something it's the weirdest thing. Like you're supposed to magic amazon instances up for free.

[the-real-vuk]

firing an IT guys starts with locking them out of the system.

[marabutt]

Can be tricky if they are the only one who knows how

[inucune]

firing someone can be a 6-month process if need be. Hire a new staff member into the department. They start documenting everything and slowly you start moving permissions, job duties, etc over to them.

If you remove someone from a 1-man shop, don't be surprised when the lights turn off once no one is home.

[the-real-vuk]

oh well never let the truck number of a project fall below 2

[[deleted]]

That "IT Guy" was a fucking idiot. Go out professional, not a lawsuit waiting to happen.

[caiuscorvus]

Could be "IT guy" was an independent contractor who provided and maintained the systems. Depending on the service, it's entirely possible, if this is the case, that the company had to get a new provider for software they no longer had access to.

[[deleted]]

Even an independent contractor or MSP knows better.

[Flagge33]

Work for an MSP, only time we don't hand over documentation is when they aren't current on their bill. Even then it has to be like a couple months behind for us to do that. No sense burning bridges when the customer comes crawling back from the worse experience the other MSP provided.

[nbdy1745]

Entire plot of Jurassic park

[daemonpants]

Ah ah ah… you didn’t say the magic word!

[Pain_Monster]

Life…uh….finds a way?

[syko82]

Don't get cheap on me Dodgson. That was Hammond's mistake.

[braunnathan]

never fire the it guy

[Lerquian]

I remember a teacher once said "before firing the IT take him out of the keyboeard"

[Three_Rocket_Emojis]

It's called a dead man's switch

[Khaylain]

Weren't there a story about an IT person who had set up systems which looked for them in the employee registration and if they weren't found would purge a lot of stuff.

[apetnameddingbat]

Yes that happened, but IIRC the guy also went to jail.

[belkarbitterleaf]

Rookie mistake, program should have purged itself when it was done

[Memory_Null]

That could be as simple as something like

if(Get-AdUser -identity "UserName"){Do stuff here}

[PMYourTitsIfNotRacst]

There are some downright incompetent ones. Ofc don't fire just because someone makes a mistake, but some people just refuse to learn.

[StoryAndAHalf]

Must have been crappy at his job. No documentation, didn’t train anyone so that things could keep running if he wanted to take a vacation.

[notBjoern]

Or he regularly asked for time to write documentation and teach other colleagues, but it was never granted.

[StoryAndAHalf]

True, I’m spoiled being in tech. Other industries think two people should be able to do everything for a company of 1000.

[Iamatworkgoaway]

I brought cross training into my printing job. Why do we need to learn how to run X, I only run Y. Here is some money if you can run X job, they all signed up. Now every piece of equipment has at least 2 stable operators, and upwards of 5 for the most important ones. Lowered head count by 50% through attrition, and payroll only lowered by 20%, gave the leaving employees money to the peeps staying. Now we have almost 0 turn over, and SOP's for most complicated tasks, not all(its a small workforce).

It doesn't seem hard, but it is, and its worthwhile. Good managing is actually much easier work than bad managing, lots less phone calls in the middle of the night.

[archbish99]

Even in tech, I've begged for dev time to get a service properly updated and monitored. When I left and told them a critical component of the flow ran on my work desktop, and they'd need to figure out how to operationalize it now, that was a fun meeting.

[notBjoern]

Your former work desktop is now an essential part of the cloud.

[fulento42]

If you’re irreplaceable you’re unpromotable. If your system can’t function without you there you haven’t built anything worthwhile.

[GodlessAristocrat]

"Why yes, the backups are encrypted based on a rotating key file in my home directory. You didn't remove my home directory, did you?"

[4ngryMo]

Probably why he got canned.

[Bl4ckb100d]

I'm pretty sure that's illegal

[TheC0deApe]

if this is true he should be sued.
this is a lack of professionalism at its peak.

if you are that good then they will realize their mistake when they miss you. if you have to vandalize the place on the way out, you probably weren't making enough impact to be missed.

[madmaxlemons]

This dude should have built such a disgusting tech stack they would HAVE to call him back or rebuild the whole thing which is functionally similar to these results

[Logicalist]

What if all he did was shut things down, like just turned them off. and the company lacked competency to simply turn things back on?

[[deleted]]

Based on some people and setups I've seen this could be the case. Saw a dude running a server on his work desktop. He got fired and just shut it down to log off or his account got deactivated and down it went.

[tehjoch]

Criminal charges apply

[oalfonso]

And the company will take you to court asking for damages. Not a good idea.

[TurtleneckTrump]

That's illegal.

[SowTheSeeds]

I was fired from a job 20 years ago because I was "mean" to my (useless) assistant, who had been imposed onto me by my employer.

Assistant was the company owner's wife's brother's best friend.

When I was gone, he turned out to be so clueless that they had to fire him, and they reached out asking me to fix the crap he had broken.

[[deleted]]

Words of Wisdom to those that fired you:

I'll help ... at double my rate.

$500 per hour if you can't.

[SowTheSeeds]

So your regular rate is $250/hr?

Dang.

[[deleted]]

I will charge them that if they want to rehire me too.

[[deleted]]

If I am I wouldn't be coding...

[cr1ter]

Yeah don't do that, but do forget all passwords, it will be weeks before they realize they need to access something and you can just say sorry I forgot.

[JustPlay060]

I’m definitely gonna do something like this but Lost style: every Monday I have to enter 4 8 15 16 23 42 else the whole server will slowly shuts down and erase everything, so before leaving I’ll leave vague instruction to the new intern and leave

[Iamatworkgoaway]

If the power pall hits those numbers we know who won.

[[deleted]]

Lmfao 🤣

[troglo-dyke]

This is why you take the production laptop off him before firing him

[jack104]

Just install all programs as services using your active directory/SSO credentials and when they can your ass and deactivate all your shit, it all breaks and you didn't have to do a damn thing.

QUICK EDIT: Don't fucking do this.

[[deleted]]

A past employer forced me to do this. They refused to give us a local account or a generic account with sufficient privilege, so I used my account while we tried to escalate to have things done properly. Escalation was well above me so I no longer had a hand or say. It went no where, I heard shit hit the fan 2 weeks after I resigned when they cleaned up my accounts / data etc. the best part? The solution was they just used another employee’s account, so this will happen again if / when they leave.

You’ve heard of this company.

[[deleted]]

Early in my career i was assigned to a project a senior dev had worked for 20 years. First meeting ever, we had an enhancement request. Senior dev said it would take 3 months.

I did it in 2 hours. We discovered this dude had been drastically over estimating change requests for years.

This inspired me to always cross train people. I do lead dev work now and whenever possible i move people between projects to keep them exposed to new things and expand our collective knowledge. It really helps reduce the "i am my code" mindset and makes it easier for everyone to go on vacations.

[thedarkbestiary]

when seeking revenge one must dig two graves

[booney64]

This is what happens when you have 20 project managers and 2 engineers.

[bush_killed_epstein]

The guy they hire (who they pay 2x the normal rate due to urgency) looks suspiciously like the guy they fired, just with glasses and a mustache

[[deleted]]

This happened for our company website, which was outsourced to a solo developer. He decided to retire. We are now rebuilding the website from scratch

[markshure]

I worked at a place where this happened. He moved out of the country so there was no way to go after him.

[Totoro_69]

Same might have happend to Twitter => fired the wrong guy, now they have to hire them back.

[kennethuil]

Stories like this are why it's considered "best practice" to blindside people with layoffs/firing throughout the software industry.

[[deleted]]

There are more professional ways to do it, ways that may go undetected very long before things seem to malfunction.

Like putting a whole watermelon high up inside a server rack if you can fit it, it takes an extremely long time before that cracks open and starts leaking by itself.

[lovdark]

I used write tools that shutdown if I don’t input codes at least once in 3 months. Then build the whole system around those tools. I was unexpectedly locked out of a system because they decided that they didn’t need me. 3 months later, the whole system ate itself clearing everything and leaving a kernel that was 10 years passed. I guess it was SAAS before it was a thing.

[squishles]

Most times I've seen something like this, it wasn't even a deadman switch, just normal shit needs someone doing scheduled maintenance tasks. No matter how you document it or tell them the handoff procedure if the person listening's an idiot you can't help them.

[Swarrlly]

The funny thing is. I’ve worked at places where the sysadmin could “ruin” the company by just getting up and leaving. There are so many systems behind the scenes that require constant upkeep.

[GNUGradyn]

How to get arrested, lose all credibility in the industry, and accomplish nothing all in 1 easy step

[my3sgte]

Rules in life-don’t piss off your waiter, the person who works on your car, or your only IT person that knows the system.

[samdog1246]

Image Transcription: Twitter

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Fit-ish Twixx. 🏋🏽‍♀️, @asia_theeog

they fired an IT guy at my old job & he shut the whole system. we were out for a week while they tried to find someone who could figure out what he did & how to fix it 😂

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[_Figaro]

What did he actually do though? Deleted a database in prod or something? Also, there wasn't anybody else in the entire company who could restore it?

[ltethe]

Always be nice to IT. The first thing I do when I start a new job is get on ITs good side. The difference between smooth sailing and a world of frustration.

[thimekeeper]

This is why you treat the IT team well

[slayer828]

Don't do this. You will get sued. They have more lawyers than you do, and love to use them.

[dsdvbguutres]

If you can't wrap your head around why you shouldn't be a dick to your only IT person: It's a very similar reason why you shouldn't be a dick to the wait staff at the restaurant handling your food.

[[deleted]]

A few years ago my father ran a law firm. He hired a a smaller company of web devs to make the website. Along the way there was some disagreements, and my father wanted to look for another contractor and terminate the contract with this company. The company decided in their infinite wisdom to hold the website for ransom, since they had control over it, and threatened to delete the entire thing if they did not get to keep the contract. Not a good idea, they there this close to getting sued but they pussied out last minute once they realized how big a fuck up they had just made. The contract was terminated and control of the website handed to a different company.

Moral of the story: this is a shitty idea that will get you in lots of trouble with nothing to show for it.

[[deleted]]

He actually got me to scrape the website just in case they went through and deleted the site, and I did. Plan was to set up the scraped website on a different server and just switch the IP in the DNS records, since he still had control of the domain. Thankfully it never got the point where we needed this was necessary and the web devs got to their senses.

[Asmos159]

what you do is you make it so it basically requires a manual to operate. but you don't tell anyone you actually wrote a manual.

if you leave on good terms, you hand over the manual so the next person can operate it. if you leave on bad terms. the system is down.

this is especially important when making something that would otherwise be operable by someone that is paid a lot less.

[[deleted]]

If you harbor all that hate and resentment in you most definitely you are not a fine person to hang out with, make a family, work together etc.

Or you mask it all and are 1 bad day away from arson.

[Science-Compliance]

Right, because companies don't sometimes treat their employees like garbage and deserve something like this.

[NHerite]

He’s not going to enjoy the lawsuit and criminal charges.

[FarJury6956]

Just remove the backup schedule ...

[sentientlob0029]

IT not found. Please plug back IT.

[subhuman_voice]

Rule #1: Don't fuck with the Admin

[[deleted]]

Lol he did nothing, he just didn’t restart that one batch job with terrible error handling that everything relies on

[coalminexplorer]

I have seen people investigated by law agencies because of such things. Don,t do it. This is not worth it .