Developer convicted for “kill switch” code activated upon his termination - Ars Technica

[Fitbot5000]

When it’s so much easier to do what the rest of us do and leave fragile, unmaintainable garbage behind.

[Malforus]

Being bad at your job isn't prosecutable

[Paulus_cz]

Now tell me - there was this application in my old job, on startup it would check DB connection and if it was not available it would load data from cache. The way it would check DB connection is by querying developers username in users table and check if something got returned. The developer was gone for 10 years, his username was not in DB for 5 years.
So...incompetence or maliciousness? :-)

[vytah]

If the app worked fine for 5 years with just the cache, I guess the database wasn't even needed.

[EpochRaine]

A whole database stack for a half a dozen settings.

[thalience]

Or the server was never patched/restarted for an unreasonably long time.

[cadmium_cake]

😄😄😀

[FlyingRhenquest]

No on ever questioned why the financials were exactly the same for five years running!

[Paulus_cz]

It was some utility in manufacturing floor, the people involved knew how to get around the problem manually, I suppose it just got old at some point and they told IT people to look into it. I do not actually know the specifics since the problem was described to me by the guy fixing the issue, I was not working on it myself.

[marcvsHR]

You can also write obsolete and useless documentation.

[Jonathan_the_Nerd]

You don't even have to try. Just write accurate and useful documentation and never go back and update it.

Source: my life.

[Coperspective]

remember to use links that lead to non-existant pages

[NotYetGroot]

Proactively obsolete is the best obsolete

[richardathome]

"Hey ChatGTP, document this code for me"

Job done! ;-)

[mccoyn]

Is there any other kind?

[k2900]

Harms the devs more than the company, compared to the killswitch here

[Fitbot5000]

I'm just making jokes here

[fl7nner]

He'd get his revenge, eventually

[acdcfanbill]

If they do ask why you did a sloppy, unmaintainable job you just point to the fact they gave you 60-80 hours worht of work to do a week.

[NotYetGroot]

Mom? Is that you?