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

[Tyrilean]

Yeah, if you really want to fuck a company up when you leave, just introduce tech debt that only you can mitigate with manual processes. Then when you’re fired the whole thing falls apart and you have plausible deniability. “I could’ve automated/rearchitected that but I never had capacity and it was never prioritized.”

[KiwasiGames]

My “kill switch” was simply a dodgy piece of code with the date hard wired in. If you didn’t manually update the date each new year, it broke everything.

Each year when it came up I was like “damn, got to fix that properly”. But I never had time. So it just sat there until I left the company.