The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

kinda unrelated but can someone explain to me how this one korean company has access to infrastructure to lock any phone anywhere in the the world? am I misreading something?

Putting aside the issue of locking real phones this has an issue of state persisting between test runs. The previous execution of a test should not change state for subsequent execution.

This is a long way of asking why the phones weren't unlocked as part of a cleanup step in the same test. Although, at this company, if they did this, they might not notice they were locking and unlocking phones whenever this ran and then periodically disable and enable their customers phones.

Author here. I shared this yesterday, didnt get much upvotes and quickly vanished. Thanks to /u/nixcraft for sharing it again! Looks like 2nd time lucky.

Im seeing the same type of comments here and on Reddit, I'll try to answer a few common ones.

1. Yes, I know it was stupid testing on production. But we'd been told we needed to release the product on Monday (this was Friday), no objections. A previous project manager had been fired for not being fast enough, and the whole test department was at risk of redundancy. Vice president level executives were asking for updates in daily standups.

Like I say in the post, sometimes, you do what you're told or you find another job. If it hadnt been the height of Covid , I might have chosen option 2.

2. Why didnt we test on a staging / dev server? We did have those, but they didnt work with the K-Pop companies servers. And we didnt have time (or enough people) to make it work. Lots of other engineers decided to just quit. Besides, we never thought K-pop would actually lock phones we didn't own.

3. Some people have asked about it: This type of app is perfectly legal. If you get a phone on contract, you don't actually own it till you pay it off, and the company is entitled to lock it. This is builtin on iPhones, Android need external apps to enforce this.

4. While it may seem stupid in retrospect (LOL, this guy calls himself an engineer, tests in production)-- at that time, it was just one firefight after another, and there was no time to think or plan. I can joke about it now, but at the time, it was one of the worst pressure cooker environments.

Some updates: After we released the 3 products, the whole QA/test department was made redundant. Including my boss, who was fired when he was attending his mother's funeral. Funnily enough, I stayed because I knew details of a legacy product. So far the last 3-4 weeks, I had no boss or anyone to report to.

Oh yes. I've accidentally run a SQL UPDATE command without a WHERE clause and blew away everyone's password. Our process to restore a backup was very manual and time consuming back then, so it was fun sitting around and waiting for that to happen while everybody was locked out of the application.

Ah, that feeling of dread in your stomach as the realization hits.