Maybe you should store passwords in plaintext

I am basically that employee in several ways.

I know about wasteful cloud spend that I do nothing about. My last comment on HN actually was asking if anyone could give me a reason to report that cloud waste. The best arguments were for the sake of the environment and to build credibility with co-workers to make it easier to jump ship. Nothing from the company at all.

I can't say I deliberately ship bugs, but I don't care that much about eliminating them. If I were not worried about legal issues, I would investigate whether we had a bug bounty program and give them to a friend to collect and split the prize.

And yes, I use the same password at my multiple full time jobs. If you knew my email, you could find that password in a password leak on the internet. So my password has already leaked. It is out there, tied to my name.

> This group of people seem to have been like that at some point in time, and then turned to “misbehaving” in this manner.

I was like that. I like creating stuff. I like building great experiences. But working as a corporate employee is an extra painful way to do it in many cases. I enjoy finding weird bugs and figuring out the fixes. But everything from the Scrum to the layoffs to the executives trying to drag you in for corporate team building events to the non-technicals who don't have a clue what you do makes it not worth it to engage at work. The project you care about will be carelessly tossed away in a reorg. You will be judged based on output report from Jira, which is actually an incentive to ship as many bugs as possible because that increases the number of Scrum points you have done.

Is that really what you want for your life? Sounds miserable to me. I want out. And I do all those things to get out as soon as possible.

So what is the endgame? Spend time working on cool things myself while doing all I can to minimize time work takes from my life. Cut every corner to save effort, from the passwords to the utter eradication of any speck of initiative. Work multiple full time jobs to accelerate progress to retirement and slash output at those jobs to make way to even more jobs, further accelerating my workforce exit.

Reading things like this reinforces the satisfaction of being independent...

When I inevitably notice these issues in the course of work for a client I can bring them up with the one writing the checks.. if they want it fixed, I fix it. If they don't, well there are other clients.

For nothing else than the sake of “life is about the journey”, please consider changing your job. It is absolutely possible to align paid employment with fulfillment.

Horribly cynical, and I can't imagine having that viewpoint. It's actually fascinating how the author first justifies that sort of malaise, and then does the "but of course not me" thing.

Even if someone were that self-focused, in almost any group or organization, critical security vulnerabilities and significant costs do hurt everyone in the group. You're going to be the ones having the rough time when expenses exceed value, and when major embarrassments happen. There is no insulation from it.

I disagree with the author that normal people don't think this way. Most people I know won't go out of their way to help their employer. In my experience you can usually find a few people who care about doing things right and they work hard, are passionate, go above and beyond, etc. Almost everyone else is in a different lane. Some are in the far right lane, where they cleverly exploiting things (as a few people mentioned in the article) but most are somewhere in between.

I don't think there is really anything you could do about it. Mostly people don't want to work. They do work for money. They won't do more work than they need to because they don't want to do that. These people also don't want to expend more energy than they have to. They won't do something hard that solves the problem if doing something easy won't get them in too much trouble.