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Things to commit just before leaving your job

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Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#71

Post by masklinn »

codeflo wrote: post #63
hydrogen18 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are absolutely correct, you will find no shortage of experienced employees at large companies that will disagree. In fact, they will insist that the only purpose of volatile is a primitive for synchronization. I actually had a conversation where a developer insisted that by declaring a variable volatile all operations on it were atomic. Of course at this same company a developer insisted that if you use the…

If those developers target Visual Studio exclusively, they are actually correct: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/12a04hfd.aspx

Except on ARM where the volatile mode is iso unless /volatile:ms is explicitly specified.

Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#72

Post by bobbyadamson »

kaolinite wrote: post #47
DeusExMachina wrote: post #31

It is always a funny joke to say "commit this when you leave a job". But I always wondered if there are people that actually do this. Although it could be funny and give a sense of revenge for some wrong (perceived or real) that the person leaving might have suffered, I don't think this would be a good idea. Contracts usually include liability for gross negligence or wilful misconduct. Does anybody have a record of t…

The problem with doing this, besides being incredibly unprofessional, is that it won't really affect the company much - besides reducing productivity for a little while - however it will annoy the hell out of your previous colleagues. Unless you're leaving because you fell out with your colleagues, I doubt it would have the desired effect.

Yeah everyone would notice it around the same time, look at recent commits, see some silly file got committed and revert. You'd have to have a team of pretty sub-par devs to not undo this fairly quickly. Although it would be sort of annoying for a couple of hours. In fact if you left on really good terms and were still great friends with the team, something like this might be more of a silly prank than anything truly malicious.

Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#73

Post by tormeh »

verelo wrote: post #49

I would suggest before you leave your job, you say "it was nice working with you" to the people you liked working with, and absolutely nothing to those who you did not enjoy working with. The tech world is big in some ways, but also equally small in others. A select few might find this funny, but others will not appreciate their day (or longer) spent debugging your practical joke...and on the chance you actually get…

And if you do a code change, make sure it is really funny, is easy to fix and discover and is invisible to customers. Like, inject a hilarious joke into the log files or something.

Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#76

Post by Symbiote »

happywolf wrote: post #29

The horror story that I heard was a disgruntled engineer silently replaced the source codes (C++ based) in the project with compiled binary object files and he kept the source codes on his local computer, not checking those in. He did this over an extended period of time to make sure this crept into the backup tapes as well. No one found out because each engineer owned a code module of their own. Then he resigned. Wh…

A friend of mine did something similar, not that long ago.

His employer told him to complete a 1-year masters in computing at his expense, including a course on ethics, or see them in court. He chose the degree course.

Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#77

Post by jasonkester »

I left a file called xmas.js included in an internal tool one time when I left for a 9 month trip in between contracts (in November).

Basically it would check whether it was the last few weeks of December, and whether rand()%20 was zero. If so, it would wait about a minute then slowly fly a little gif of Santa & his sleigh across the background, behind all the controls on whatever form it happened to land on.

They had a team of data entry guys using this tool, and it would take on average a few minutes to enter each record. So it made its way through QA and eventually to the desk of a friend. Got an email on the beach about it. Fun times.

Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#79

Post by noxToken »

joncp wrote: post #38
DeusExMachina wrote: post #31

It is always a funny joke to say "commit this when you leave a job". But I always wondered if there are people that actually do this. Although it could be funny and give a sense of revenge for some wrong (perceived or real) that the person leaving might have suffered, I don't think this would be a good idea. Contracts usually include liability for gross negligence or wilful misconduct. Does anybody have a record of t…

Worse. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may be able to get you arrested for hacking.

Not some - all* US jurisdictions.

From the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S. Code § 1030(5)(A)):

>knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer

Re: Things to commit just before leaving your job

#80

Post by heinrich5991 »

noxToken wrote: post #79
joncp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may be able to get you arrested for hacking.

Not some - all* US jurisdictions. From the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S. Code § 1030(5)(A)): >knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer

The US isn't the whole world. ;)
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