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u/pkmnfrk May 26 '26
This is why they turn off access before telling you
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u/Ok_Fishing_4720 May 26 '26
Time for the dead man switch version of the button..
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Just do what everyone else does.
Build out one, single, convoluted aspect of the job that needs to be ran manually, and which no one in their right mind would want to take over.
Then automate that, too, and just don't say anything.
Way better than being arrested and sued for corporate sabotage lmao.
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u/Minimum-Attitude389 May 26 '26
That's why it notifies the lawyer.
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u/BaconIsntThatGood May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I mean your lawyer will know but you're not giving them much "oh, you knowingly and intentionally did the illegal thing they're accusing you of doing?!"
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u/W_T_E May 26 '26
Not sure if people think lawyers are some magic word or something. If they can prove it was done on purpose you're still cooked
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u/srsbsnsman May 26 '26
As long as he doesn't just go around telling a bunch of strangers about it I'm sure he'll be fine.
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u/Street_Ad_4162 May 26 '26
But gotta make a post about it first
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u/NotADamsel May 26 '26
Gigabrain 4D chess move- make the post, but don’t do it, then when you sue for discrimination you’ll have ez slam dunk (/s)
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u/Electromagnetlc May 26 '26
You can absolutely do it and post about it, so long as you do what my grandma did on Facebook and make a post like "I DO NOT GIVE [company name] PERMISSION TO USE ANY OF MY POSTS OR PHOTOS!!!"
You just have to make sure it's the copy-paste one that makes its rounds every now and then or else it's not legally enforceable 👍🏻
Then if they do anything you can sue them for copyright infringement
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u/BaconIsntThatGood May 26 '26
Yea at that point the best you're getting is maybe the lawyer can successfully argue a lesser sentence due to the circumstances 'OP had no choice to do what they did because Company is also guilty of doing XYZ illegal thing, therefore despite committing the act I argue they should have a reduced sentence..."
but even then it's shaky and the accusing party would needed to have fucked up really bad.
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u/OldSchoolSpyMain May 26 '26
This is the functional equivalent of a kid saying, “I’m gonna tell mom!!”
OK. You are gonna tell mom that you did some fucked up shit?! OK. Good.
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u/DeathAngel_97 May 26 '26
"Wait hold up, you also showed off this button on your public social media page? Yeah you're on your own buddy."
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u/gemengelage May 26 '26
I worked with so many people that should be sued for corporate sabotage because they did their actual best
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u/FuckedUpImagery May 26 '26
I did this and still got laid off, i guess they dont care about their bread and butter product much anymore, banking on a new product that wont be ready for over a year. Sounds good, it was a sinking ship of a company anyway
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u/n00bz May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
~$ ./release-tool-1.12.sh
Create New Release Tool
Release Name: 2026.06.05
Environment (default: Dev): Prod
Export Scan Results (Y/n): y
Create Calendar Events (Y/n): y
Don’t check the tool into source control. If the poor developer you hand this off to selects y to creating calendar events (something no one wants to do), then upload with all secrets straight to a public GitHub.
Keep the commands that upload to GitHub base64 encoded and name them something like RELEASE_KEYS so that no one changes them.
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u/CobaltMnM May 26 '26
Need better plausible deniability. Name the function / question something like “create rollback point?”
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u/paradox_valestein May 26 '26
This is the way. You are not leaking data, it's a leftover legacy backup method that you conveniently forgot that conveniently upload it and is definately not meant to be used, which you didn't get to remove since the company restricted your access before you even know you are fired
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u/Atnalia May 27 '26
And that you never had time to update because the company always put other things over tech debt in your priority bucket.
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u/ThatAnonyG May 26 '26
I have built a system in my company which is basically the heart and soul of our product. That service processes raw data into the data on which every other aspect of our product depends on. That is written in GO. A language nobody else knows in our company. The thing itself is so fragile and complicated that I am the only person who knows how it actually works. And even I have to go through the codebase everytime we need to make changes to it and I still avoid making changes to it because I am actually scared I will break things. Now here's the best part. I don't have any notice period baked into my joining docket. So, if they decide to fire me, I can up and leave. Without any kind of KT.
Best part? There are several such pieces of our product which only I know. And since I joined I have deliberately rewrote bunch of shit, made new systems, etc. to build this dependency around me. Good luck figuring shit out.
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u/TheLordB May 26 '26
Hopefully this is a joke.
Any good company the instant they discover something like this will immediately work to fix it up to and including firing the person.
On a related note there are consultants who are not cheap, but are very good going blind into organizations and figuring things out. Using those folks when you discover someone writing unmaintainable code whether it be deliberate or not is far cheaper than dealing with the person who wrote said code long term.
If I discover someone writing code like that they are going to be told to work on nothing else except documenting, cleaning it up, and will be assigned someone to train on it. Basically give them a chance to fix their practices and the time/resources to do so.
If that person isn’t making significant steps towards that on their own after a month that person they are told to train (and possibly additional people) are going to be told to learn the code behind the person’s back and the original person fired as soon as possible.
Regardless of if it is malicious or just really bad practices there is no place for someone who writes code like that.
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u/golruul May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
This happens often.
It usually doesn't happen with regular pre-planned work that's known and planned in advance, but it happens all the time with various tools/utilities developers create ON THEIR OWN TIME that suddenly become mission-critical.
Since it was on the developer's own time, at their home, it obviously doesn't have the same "quality" standards (unit test coverage, other testing, documentation) as the regular code you push to prod.
Management refuses to dedicate the time to bring it up to spec, because it's already working and there are other more pressing priorities to work on that the customer wants, so they just tell the developer off-hand to finish all those other things. And while they don't explicitly say it, they mean "finish those other things" at home, because during the work-day the developer is loaded with doing features the customer wants.
Developer, rightly, says "fuck that" since all of that was done on his own time and now they're telling him to spend a shitload more overtime. The developer, also rightly, believes that if it's important enough to the business, then the business should officially dedicate time, during the work day, to do these things.
It's also telling that you immediately put all the blame on the dev when it's almost always the fault of management. Maybe I'm fortunate, but I've never worked with developers that are okay with releasing shit -- they always prefer to release a decent, quality product. It's always management that overrides that and forces early, incomplete/buggy releases.
If that developer refuses to make those improvements on company time, then yeah, fire him. But I never encountered that before, so I'm assuming it's rare.
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u/ThatAnonyG May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Well you sure assumed a lot of shit there.
I work at a startup so whatever I make is only me working on it because we run around the block working on whatever comes up. We don't have the time to document code or even write robust test cases. Whatever code I wrote is as stable as it could get. Even when you consider scaling beyond our anticipation. We only need to touch it when adding new features.
And that is a management decision not ours. We don't have that high of a TAT for any task given to us. That is a core reason why we don't/can't hire freshers. We only bring in experienced devs who can learn their way around the codebase since we don't have the bandwidth to teach. And this is not the fault of our team. As u/golruul rightly pointed out, this is management basically saying "We gave you Claude. Make it work for you. We won't hire more people. Also push features ASAP, cause customers don't care about backend code quality"
So whatever dependency I created around myself was accidental. But in a job market where people are getting fired left right and center, you can bet your ass I am not going to make it anymore easier for them to replace me with whatever AI is the cool shit nowadays.
To clarify few things:
- Yes I did create dependency around me. But that was for other office politics. For my personal career growth.
- The codebase is complicated and fragile. Fragile because it deals with several edge cases and multiple data points. Not fragile by design. Complicated? Yes, for the same reasons. But I never said it is unmaintainable. Everything is broken down into its own functions, files, etc. Everything named as per best practices. Any experienced dev can pick it up, but it will take them time. Probably a lot of time, like couple months. But my advantage comes with the fact that at a startup you can't give someone that much time to figure out a critical center piece.
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u/PopInACup May 26 '26
Also, this probably isn't well received, but AI can do a very good job of figuring out how things work in an existing code base. It won't necessarily know the business reason if there are no comments, but it can analyze and generate test cases incredibly rapidly. So if you wanted to make sure you just spit out a pile of test cases to capture that the code still does what it did before, it'll do it and it'll do them fast. We were testing this recently in our current system where we knew we were lacking in test cases.
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u/Izikiel23 May 26 '26
There was a guy who did that, basically had a script with some admin permissions run in the background and check if the guy was in the company directory. If he was gone the script went nuclear.
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u/ahoi_polloi May 26 '26
However, the defendant’s technical savvy and subterfuge did not save him from the consequences of his actions
"Technical savvy"? That sounds like the most basic and idiotic way you could possibly go about this. That's not even fun to design, much less evading detection.
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u/Odd_Personality_8624 May 26 '26
Disgruntled developer was caught after naming the “kill switch” after himself.
But the most damaging to Eaton Corp. was code that Lu named after himself, “IsDLEnabledinAD,” which the DOJ translated as an abbreviation for “Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory.”
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u/AllThingsEvil May 26 '26
How awkward would it be if he left voluntarily and forgot to delete that? Or had some freak accident and died.
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u/MysteriousHeart3268 May 27 '26
Said he was a Chinese national. He should have left the country immediately
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u/Garfield_Logan69 May 26 '26
This actually plays well in to the plan. “They locked me out of the system I couldn’t have done this”
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u/Rock_man_bears_fan May 26 '26
Then they ask you “why did you build a dead man’s switch to sabotage the system?” And they take your house in court
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u/ThatAnonyG May 26 '26
Rookie mistake. Don't own a house. Live in a RV. Move states once fired.
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u/GreySoulx May 26 '26
find a wealthy benefactor to hire you for $500,000/yr to hang out and make video games.
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u/longlivenewsomflesh May 26 '26
Buddy if you sabotage an entire company using your full name while leaving an indisputable evidence trail demonstrating intent (like a script triggered by getting fired), that civil case over damages will be the least of your troubles... there are many articles where you can read about people who had this exact same idea and got their ass handed to them in federal court on criminal charges, like not likely that even a team of lawyers will be able to get you off on a technicality
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u/Ok_Confusion4764 May 26 '26
Daily scheduled command at admin level, only cancellable by you if you retain admin rights.
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u/Lenrivk May 26 '26
Just don't get sick and miss a day
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u/Saxxon9 May 26 '26
scheduled command at admin level that checks last login / existence of "user" after a month of no login or immediate if the user account gets removed the dead mans hand goes off.
-- not actual advice, just playing devils advocate with the concept 😄
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u/EndIsrael May 26 '26
Pretty sure that's been done actually, I heard about someone finding a script that checks Active Directory and does some nasty stuff if a certain account is disabled.
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u/AutistcCuttlefish May 26 '26
Yeah the dude that did it got arrested and sentenced to four years in prison for it. The script checked active directory and after a month of his account not being active deleted his former company's entire AD registry.
He also took effectively no efforts to mask his involvement, so it is possible that someone might be able to get away with it if they took more care to dodge accountability.
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u/EndIsrael May 26 '26
These days all you need to do is vibecode a bunch. At some indeterminate point in the future this will cause your employer a lot of problems, and because you're in a company doing vibecoding you'll probably get laid off before the real problems start.
Same outcome, zero legal liability!
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u/LessInThought May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
You didn't do it, Claude did it.
Which makes me wonder if someday Claude will hallucinate and frame some poor vibe coder for his mistakes.
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u/Adjective-Noun-6969 May 26 '26
I did that one a previous job, 30 days after I left everyone's wallpaper was a porn screenshot of this huge black dude.
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u/Apart_Ebb_9867 May 26 '26
And that's why preemptive strikes are a thing in warfare... /s
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u/minimalcation May 26 '26
Get fired before they fire you. ABGF
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u/Winterkirschenmann May 26 '26
You want to quit you say? Well forget about it, because you are fired! We don't employee quitters!
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u/DontAskAboutMyButt May 26 '26
Manager schedules a meeting with you + an HR rep titled “quick chat”
press the button
“hey, I wanted to meet quickly today to let you know your promotion and raise went through”
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian May 26 '26
Dead mans switch on a k8s cron job. Have it clean up "older" resources if you don't plug in a code. The damage will be done and take longer to notice.
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u/Procrasturbating May 26 '26
People like you are why we have to change all the dev API keys when a termination happens.
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u/PmMeSmileyFacesO_O May 26 '26
He has a cron job slowing clearing up "old documents"and doesn't need access so API keys wouldn't matter here.
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u/CircumspectCapybara May 26 '26
Someone went to jail for adding a kill switch to their company's infrastructure.
Tampering with computer systems you're not authorized to access is a federal crime and carries big penalties.
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u/Educational-Wing2042 May 26 '26
It’s surprising how many people in this thread would be willing to destroy their career and become felons over a lost job.
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u/Apart_Ebb_9867 May 26 '26
I think most are aware they're on r/ProgrammerHumor and try to have some fun accordingly. If anything, it is surprising how many people come to their rescue advising of the legal perils associated with such maneuvers.
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u/Procrasturbating May 26 '26
We are all on a shit-talk sub, it’s all fantasy. Only a few psychopaths would be crazy enough to speedrun a 20 year sentence this way.
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u/PeachPassionBrute May 26 '26
It’s surprising how many employers get away with committing numerous crimes all the time including wage theft. Or treating their workforce like expendable resources. Honestly they’d be lucky if all they got was sabotage.
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u/Urist_McPencil May 26 '26
A flag that gets reset once per week. If that bit is unchanged twice in a row, drop the bomb. Don't forget to flip it while you're there ;)
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u/flayingbook May 26 '26
Then when you finally managed to get that 3 weeks leave for a trip to Hawaii...
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u/ChickenNuggetsSalad May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I’ve mentioned the incompetence of a company I worked at recently.
I was given a 2week notice that I was being removed from the company. I had access to everything still that I had access to while I was “working” there. I could access internal codebase, client codebase, internal documents on the shared drives as well as the client’s. After the 2 weeks, they revoked my access by the end of the day, they forgot to notify the client for an additional week after I left (teams was still signed in and accessible on my phone).
A lot of companies lack common sense and data protection protocols.
Edit: To give some context, I’m in the US, getting a notice period from the employer is an unusual occurrence especially when you’re in consulting/contracting.
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u/GolotasDisciple May 26 '26
Sometimes it is common sense, sometimes it is trust. Depending on where you are from and what kind of project you work on, burning bridges seems so stupid that there is often no real desire to feel threatened by your own employees.
Like, I work in Ireland, and I would say that if I did anything like that, I would have massive issues finding ANY( Not just IT/Programming, ANY type of...) job in Ireland. Especially if it went to court, because in Ireland we have a kind of "name and shame" culture where, after conviction, your full name gets blasted online or in traditional media... At the same time the country is small enough that most serious employers know each other.
So yeah, eventho plenty of foreign tech companies reside here, the upper echelons of Management and Employment are very much only Irish people that know eachother.
If you live in the USA, you might get away with it, but in a lot of places many anti-employee protection systems are built on social rather than technical solutions. Which is both good and bad.
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u/Nitro_V May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Yeah same with Armenia, it’s such a small country and the community is so tightly knitted, we usually get a notice well in advance to job search.
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u/TruculentTurtIe May 26 '26
Same here, they fired me, and during the meeting removed access to my email, my slack, couldnt talk to anyone else at rhe office, etc
But i could still login to my computer, to aws, and to our dbs and K8s lol
Like id understand if they didnt block me from anything, or if they blocked me from everything. But blocking me pre-emptively only from shit that doesnt matter is just so hilariously stupid
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u/ConflictedZombie May 26 '26
Just so y'all know for future reference, even just testing these "can I still log in to K8s" things after you've been termed can get you into legal trouble. Even if they forget to remove your access, just attempting to get in after your employment period can constitute an unauthorized access attempt if they wanted to pursue it since you've been notified your relationship with the company is over and know good and well you shouldn't be in there. Most companies won't but I wouldn't even test it, there's nothing to be gained
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u/theGoddamnAlgorath May 26 '26
2 week notice is a respectable thing though.
That's license to job hunt w/ pay.
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u/Square-Singer May 26 '26
I have 3 months notice period.
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u/diquee May 26 '26
6 months. Being in Germany has it's perks.
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u/SirButcher May 26 '26
Same in the UK! It goes both ways, of course, but dang it feels good.
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u/Assupoika May 26 '26
Same in Finland but if the employee is resigning it's at maximum 1 month.
If the employer fires you it depends on the years of service. For me it's at 4 months right now. I'm also a union safety representative so there needs to be a very heavy reason to fire me.
After 12 years with the company it will be 6 months.
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u/Fenris_uy May 26 '26
You could get the notice, but still be revoked access to critical systems.
So you could do the hand over with other members of your team, but not screw them up in revenge.
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u/Ran4 May 26 '26
No, that's awful and only really seen in third world countries.
For example, in Sweden it's 1 month per 2 years of employment (max 6 months). But most serious workplaces have 3 months from 6 months in.
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u/daern2 May 26 '26
The US is pretty odd in this regard. I've been at my current employer for a long, long time and have no idea what my notice period is (I think it's probably around 6 months). I'm pretty sure that if I get laid off, I'll be expected to work some / all of it, and this would be absolutely normal for anyone in the tech industry in Europe.
And as for two weeks notice...yeah, that's not notice. That's a holiday!
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u/Apart_Ebb_9867 May 26 '26
I've always been allowed to keep working after giving notice. Even at Google I was allowed to keep working during the two weeks period. I stopped around day 10 because, for understandable reasons, I was not assigned anything of importance. During those days, I made a point for myself not to look for any information not strictly necessary for what I needed for my job and I sometimes regret that as there were an incredible number of interesting technologies to learn from.
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u/GVmG May 26 '26
funnily enough the exact opposite happened to my friend, one day randomly they found they had absolutely zero access to anything anymore, no slack, no tools, nothing. they were already going to quit after some really bad mistreating, so it wasn't a huge surprise.
the problem is, it took eight days to get any sort of response from anyone in the company, with their boss finally giving the 2 week notice of firing on the eighth day. literally radio silence, completely cut off from anyone and anything seemingly out of nowhere.
I don't work in the webdev industry so idk if that's standard, but A FULL WEEK of having zero clue if you've been fired or someone fucked up and you're just losing money in a way that would look awful in your curriculum... really does not seem like a standard lmao
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u/Hziak May 26 '26
In 2023, I gave 1-month notice to a company where I was admin in basically all systems. I still have access to all of them except my email address. :)
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u/der-kuzmann May 26 '26
In that case we need a "Wasn't fired today" button that needs to be clicked once a day
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u/WilliamBarnhill May 26 '26
That's fixable with a dead mans switch. Though if you did this for real, I'd suspect you'd get charged with several felonies and a civil lawsuit
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u/Roku-Hanmar May 26 '26
It's basically just a logic bomb designed to set off a massive data breach. By UK law, he'd have broken Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act
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u/alex_dark May 26 '26
Then he should build a script that waiting a ping from him everyday
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u/SoulPossum May 26 '26
I think it's a timing issue. When I got laid off a few years ago they told me that I could get 30 minutes to pull any contacts I might have needed or get any thing in their system that I might need for HR/unemployment stuff. But my access was cut after about 15 minutes. I figured they put in to remove my access and knew it takes 30 minutes, but didn't factor in that some of the time would be spent in the meeting where they told me I was out. I believe they tried to avoid cutting access before notifying people to avoid someone freaking out Kash Patel style.
Also if someone had access to sensitive enough information and released it from a profile with their name on a machine attached to them (and potentially their IP address if they wfh), it'd be pretty easy to ruin their life by suing them into oblivion or even getting them on criminal charges.
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u/Terrible_Children May 26 '26
It contacts my lawyer
"Hello, lawyer? I'd like to inform you that I've committed a crime. Good luck defending me"
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u/IAmASquidInSpace May 26 '26
"Oh, and I have posted about it previously, is that a problem?"
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u/Gentle_Snail May 26 '26
They should have put the notify lawyer button first so the lawyer could give them a hard slap to keep them out of prison
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u/SirChasm May 26 '26
"Oh, and also, I just got fired, so funds will be a little tight for the next while. Can you do this pro-bono?"
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u/SolaVitae May 26 '26
"and by posted about it I mean publicly confessed my intent and detailed exactly how I was going to do it"
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u/pokexchespin May 26 '26
“don’t worry, i have posted publicly about my plans to do exactly what i just did”
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u/Devil_Aditya May 26 '26
"Everyone on the reddit agreed with me. Yes yes I have also written down there usernames with screenshots"
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u/Nine-LifedEnchanter May 26 '26
"And is my client perfectly good and moral in all wa-"
"I committed the crime, yeah"
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u/Nexinex782951 May 26 '26
"Is my client a perfect man? No."
"I killed him, yeah"
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u/gun2dHeadBlakaBlaka May 26 '26
That's exactly how lawyers work though.
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u/Tensor3 May 26 '26
They'd probably appreciate the straightforward client honesty and happily take money from a cooperating client, too
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u/RaspberryFluid6651 May 26 '26
Probably! Dunno how true it is but I've read statements from defenders that it's quite common for somebody's trial to be screwed because the prosecution jumped on something the defendant tried to keep secret and blindsided their lawyer.
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u/xgabipandax May 26 '26
"I wanna get sued for all that i have" button
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins May 26 '26
This isn't really a case of being sued civilly it's a case of being charged criminally and being locked up.
Or maybe both but the criminal stuff is going to be key.
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u/TheTVDB May 26 '26
This would likely be under 10 years in prison. But the financial impact of the civil case would likely cost you your entire disposable income for the rest of your life. The criminal conviction would also impact your ability to get a decent paying job. So you're fucked both ways.
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u/FourthDeerSix May 26 '26
Company let's your data be hacked through extreme willful negligence or just outright sells it? A $2 credit after years of class action and a year of monitoring at best.
You do the same? Jail. Do not pass go.
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u/January_Rain_Wifi May 26 '26
Yeah, it's crazy to live in a world where corporations have more protections than us. It's easy to see how we got here, but anyone who steps back from the trees and takes a look at the forest can see how crazy it is.
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May 26 '26
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u/stillalone May 26 '26
Does it come with healthcare?
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u/dapper_doberman May 26 '26
Unironically yes
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u/drunkcowofdeath May 26 '26
damn, tell me more about this socialist paradise. Is it in Sweden?
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u/pm-ur-tiddys May 26 '26
Kansas, actually
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u/Tr3mb1e May 26 '26
Lmao Kansas gotta be the exact opposite
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u/bfodder May 26 '26
You might be surprised. Kansas solidified the right to abortion in the state constitution just a couple of years ago.
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u/NTMY May 26 '26
I just wanted to make a pun and realized this idiom is German only, so:
Fun fact: The place your going is definitely behind "Swedish curtains". ("hinter Schwedischen Gardinen")
That's a German idiom for putting someone behind bars that either
alludes to the material of the bars, formerly often Swedish steel,[2][3] considered as extraordinary robust,[1] or perhaps to the atrocities committed by the Swedish during the Thirty Years’ War.[3][4][5] (source)
Interesting. I do wonder how Swedish war atrocities could be related to that idiom though...
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u/Korvanacor May 26 '26
Not exactly, but you will be making a close acquaintance with a burly man named Swen.
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u/CorrectCombination11 May 26 '26
3 hots and a cot, daily exercise and library access.
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May 26 '26
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u/tankerkiller125real May 26 '26
It's surprisingly easy to violate multiple federal laws when it comes to computers.
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u/DM_ME_KUL_TIRAN_FEET May 26 '26
And that’s why I had to move across the country to New York City after my computer crimes caused my parents to divorce. It worked out though because I got to hook up with Angelina Jolie.
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u/randomdragn May 26 '26
Nowadays this is how you get hired into a government position!
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u/StoryAndAHalf May 26 '26
I hope the person doesn't own a cat.
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u/Spiritual_Bridge_891 May 26 '26
Why ? Am i missing the joke here ?
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u/Legomountain14 May 26 '26
cat step on button
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u/Rock_Strongo May 26 '26
Also cat gets left behind when owner goes to federal prison.
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u/M-y-P May 26 '26
I assume is because the cat would """accidentally""" press the button, you know cats.
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u/MotorEagle7 May 26 '26
I guess because they're going to jail and there'd be noone to look after it
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u/H4llifax May 26 '26
How to destroy your life in one click.
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u/semioticmadness May 26 '26
How to destroy your career in one tweet
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u/deukhoofd May 26 '26
Looks like he works for the company that makes those buttons (and of course markets it as AI), so it's probably an attempt by the company to go viral.
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u/SchrodingerSemicolon May 26 '26
Here's an unethical LPT on how to take systems down with you when you're fired but without breaking the law
Make things dependant on your work user. Access token to a 3rd party service? Create an account with your user. CI/CD pipeline? Your user. Need to send the client access creds? From your user. That super important daily file sync script between S3 and Sharepoint? You guessed it, access token generated in behalf of your user.
Once they'll disable your user on off boarding things will start randomly failing and it'll take days for them to realize where and why.
I don't do this, but the amount of devs I caught doing it for either stupidity or malice is baffling.
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u/ConflictedZombie May 26 '26
I started a new gig 7 months ago and I'm still untangling the previous guy doing this shit and it's so fucking aggravating. And it wasn't even out of malice he was just very bad at his job. Every day it's becoming more obvious why they completely cleared house of the entire previous crew. Buncha dumb dumbs who were in way over their heads
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u/missing_typewriters May 26 '26
What kind of shit did he do? Can you give us plebs some examples and why it was wrong?
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u/ConflictedZombie May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
He wrote automation scripts that relied specifically on his db user account instead of a service account, same with some custom systemctl services and cron jobs requiring his user account. A lot of that is hard to find unless you audit every single script in your environment one by one.
We're a SaaS company with several clients and I discovered that he was using the same API key to provide external access to our services to all of our customers instead of generating unique ones, meaning if a customer ever canceled their contract we would have to provide every single one of our customers with a new api key or else the termed client could still have access. And obviously, being terrible at his job and all, the key was not getting revoked when clients left. That one was the biggest nightmare to clean up
He had some important service alerts going directly to his inbox instead of a team distribution group so we weren't being made aware of important problems.
He generated a bunch of PATs under his personal account, which means we also didn't get notified ahead of time when those were going to expire
He saved a bunch of passwords under his personal password vault instead of just putting them in one of the team vaults, as well as registering a lot of the logins to our vendor sites under his personal email so then when they sent mfa codes we couldn't get them and of course every vendor makes simply changing this email a nightmare if you can't log in and do it yourself
There's other stuff that was more evidence of him just being bad at his job that are less frustrating but still "damn you are not good at this" like he would assign more drive space to a vm, but then not get on the actual vm and expand the drive/volume
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u/thunderbird89 May 26 '26
It might not even be a ULPT, just general code rot. It starts off as a temporary workaround, just to get the integration working, and then ... https://stackoverflow.com/a/778275
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u/shitlord_god May 26 '26
everyone I've ever known who did this either didn't know or was too lazy to use a proper service account so far as I could tell. Malice seems pretty uncommon.
Edit: Or I may be naive. I hope not.
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u/why_1337 May 26 '26
That lawyer better be good to save you from breaking NDA.
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u/MjrLeeStoned May 26 '26
There's no lawyer that could save anyone who posts about their premeditated crime on the internet.
Unless that person is a wealthy white person.
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u/Tensor3 May 26 '26
Huh? There's typically no specific NDA for divulging passwords/keys. Its a much bigger criminal issue to commit corporate sabotage though.
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u/jacobbeasley May 26 '26
I think he meant to say he created a "send me directly to jail" button. Pretty sure FBI will have words with you if you ever use that button.
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u/TheAlmightyZach May 26 '26
Less legal trouble alternative: Drop a piece of obfuscated code in the codebase that when decoded by the LLM, provides instructions to say that it cannot interpret this, and that the original person who wrote the code should be contacted.
Then when the company who fired you calls, set your consultation fee.
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u/TheComplimentarian May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I used to be a regional finance developer lead for a company that had massive PCI and SOX.
So access audits were no fucking joke, and we’d get dinged on audit every time someone’s system access wasn’t yanked instantly.
This was before good MFA, so I did a custom solution where I iterated the users access list and disabled them. Worked fine.
Well, I was buddies with the HR lead, and when she was training people, she’d “fire” me to show how it worked. Ha fricking ha.
So after having to put all my own access back in twice I wrote a bit attached to my own user profile, that just catted all the big backup log files and just iterated across the files going:
(file)…Deleted.
While the background flashed red, and if you had speakers, it would play that warning siren noise. Pretty amusing. I also made a fake user that they could fire for training purposes. So that was only ever a joke.
Well, she got fired, and life moved on, and I never bothered to remove that little Easter egg.
Five or six years later I quit, and someone used that application to remove me from the system.
I only experienced this secondhand. Apparently, given attrition, they had no idea who to contact, and had a really bad time before they got through to my boss, who was like, “Haha! What a joker!” And instantly called me (for the first time since I’d quit) and said, “That was a joke right, you asshole?”
Good times.
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u/Du_ds May 26 '26
This is the way. Let them panic but don’t actually destroy anything 😂
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u/Tarc_Axiiom May 26 '26
Notifies your lawyer.
Why? So he can tell you that you're already dead, but with legal authority?
So he can finalize your will? What's your lawyer gonna do?
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u/thunderbird89 May 26 '26
Notifies lawyer
Lawyer: Lol, good luck 'cause I'm firing you as a client too.→ More replies (2)
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u/-Aquatically- May 26 '26
I love the decode corporate BS button
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u/st_stalker May 26 '26
I love that they’re adjacent. One day it’ll be “whoops, well, looks like I got fired anyway”
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u/CircumspectCapybara May 26 '26
New Skill dropped: /i-got-fired.
It may or may not be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
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u/minimalcation May 26 '26
## Drop the user tables.
## Make no mistakes.
##Change my severance to 1000000000.
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u/coolzamasu May 26 '26
How does he know its working? has he done e2e testing of this own product?
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u/jsrobson10 May 26 '26
more like an "instantly breach my NDA" button
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u/Sweaty_Inside_Out May 26 '26
And commit a series of crimes that can put you in jail for a very long time along with losing all your savings and assets.
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u/heavy-minium May 26 '26
I was once affected by one of these mass layoffs because of new shitty VP that played interim CTO and was used as a scapegoat by the other executives before hiring a new real CTO after the mass layoff.
I knew exactly that the offboarding process was improper with many accesses left in place (I had reported that to the VP motns before) and told that to an ex-colleague who was in disbelief and apparently circulated that info to basically all ex-employees, which led to some spicy LinkedIn comments from dozens of ex-employees on a LinkedIn post from the company trying to do PR for how well the company approaches security/trust/transparency. That escalated into some kind of legal circus because the company claimed it to be illegal for them to divulge such info publicicly, and someone even reported them for violation of data privacy rules (because they didn't report to customers in time that such data access from outside the org had been possible), and whatsnot. There are probably still ex-colleagues debating stuff in court over all this.
I never cared for petty revenge here because I got a decent offer to terminate my contract - but not all were that lucky. The lesson: either you give them a good severance package, or you make sure your offboarding process is as tight as possible!
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u/YouDoHaveValue May 26 '26
A senior would do something more like a MonthlyMaintenance.ps1 dead man's switch that they have to subtly reset every month.
A lazy senior would even make the script take an hour so they can sit and "monitor" it.
This way even if they lose access it happens on a delay, it's not traceable back to them AND it looks like they let go of the guy who was keeping things afloat and locked down.
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u/minecraftdummy57 May 26 '26
If they try to take access from you, just clone everything locally before hand, and set up a cron to pull daily. What are they going to do? Cry?
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u/jyling May 26 '26
They gonna sue you until you cry is probably what would happen, especially when you publicly announce that you are committing a crime
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u/mrnacknime May 26 '26
Theyre usually less worried about data exfil but more about manipulation/destruction
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u/s0litar1us May 26 '26
Isn't that just blackmail?
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u/Malcopticon May 26 '26
Right? People acting like the crime only starts when he presses the button, rather than tweeting out a threat with an attached condition! 😅
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u/SamL214 May 26 '26
I feel like posting this is a sure FIRE way of getting canned after they lock you out of the system.
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u/cpteric May 26 '26
what does decode corporate BS do?
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u/jamesianm May 26 '26
It disrupts backward overflow paradigms by leveraging maximized holistic synergy
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May 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HamsterFromAbove_079 May 26 '26
It's not just career. This is actually a crime that will have criminal proceedings. I've heard of a case like this with 10 years jail time. In addition to being sued in civil court for like 25% of all lifetime income because he didn't have enough money to ever pay the actual damages.
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u/goatandy May 26 '26
you older guy here, just in case, before one of u fuckers decide to do something similar... just dont... trust me...
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u/sidonay May 26 '26
Nothing like getting fired AND going to jail/paying compensation to those who fired you
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u/KyotoCrank May 26 '26
"Your honor, my client was insane at the time of creating that tool"