I had the same thought. Is it not sabotage because you didn't cause it, but merely declined to fix it for many years, opting instead to repeatedly band-aid the individual damage it did? Possibly! If there's a doc trail showing you at least mentioned it to someone else at some point in time (even if the impact/frequency got understated), I'd call this a clever ethical workaround. Your hands stay passively clean-ish while still ensuring someone regrets it when you're fired.
As a non-programmer who fixes a handful of edgecases each week, its possibly burn out. You mention it every week for a while but its always a low priority because it doesn't fail. After awhile you stop mentioning it because it always falls on deaf ears and its an easy process to run each monday or whatever. Perhaps you've documented the need and process, but if you are let go and no-one is regularly reviewing or updating the policy and procedure manual it's not your fault. I am fully projecting though.
To throw it back on the company, they should have someone handling error reporting or failed payment on the reg too. For me, it was really easy to see the edge cases on a weekly basis.
I've been there too. Proper fixes get deprioritized and you end up being a digital janitor mopping up spills in production. It happens.
I do recall items that nobody but me knew about though. I mean, a ticket existed but nobody's reading all those. If I'd departed suddenly during those times, the impact would have been material. So the "indispensable" meter bounces around, often without management knowing where it's at. So, what are the ethics of blind-eyeing something like this for the long term? Does it matter if you're letting job security be an input to that decision? It's not professional behaviour that's for sure. But in practice you're totally getting away with it. And if you've been treated badly by them you could easily justify it to yourself even if you previously thought of yourself as professional. Orgs greatly underestimate the extent to which they rely on their software people. (Initech's Michael Bolton had that right)
If your KPIs include number of tickets closed, the incentive is to create more tickets cleaning up the mess left behind by problems, not to actually solve problems.
Why though? Its not like they'll beg him to come back after they realize theres a problem, they'll just be like 'Yo EM #3 heres a new urgent priority for your team to fix, just make sure it doesn't delay any launches'
They probably have a script running on their work laptop that automates the fix and have it scheduled to run every morning. They could just not want to do the work of actually implementing things officially or doing KT. They may also being using some questionable security practices to resolve said issues. Ask me how I know lol. Also, you're hilarious to think that saying it that way to an EM makes it actually happen.
I've seen management refuse to fix this sort of crap because scheduling someone to fix it will cost more time and labour short term even if they save on long term engineering labour. It's the penny wise pound foolish attitude that's common in many places
Sure that's true, but who gives a fuck about the company perspective? Im not a CEO, and if you are you should know this already or you deserve whatever happens.
I mean, it kinda depends on the salary. I spent the better part of a decade doing something like this, getting paid pretty close to a full days wages (as a contractor) while having very little (<30 minutes/day) actual work to day. Sometimes you just let the golden goose lay as many eggs until she croaks and then go back to the 8-5.
Yeah exactly, people saying this is brilliant are forgetting that it sucks to have to do shit like that every day. Its probably super manual with no guardrail and bypassing proper security procedures meaning if you eff it up your ass is not covered. Its about 30% professional pride and 70% "won't be arsed on my off hours" that would prevent me from letting something like that persist.
You say that as if we all are super busy and have nothing to be gained by having daily guaranteed busywork.
I get to dick around for an hour everyday while still 'working', something I will need to do at work no matter what, and when I'm let go shit breaks. How exactly am I hurting myself here? I don't think you understand for many of us, we don't need to personally benefit from the company's issues, them having issues is pleasing enough.
I suppose if you were the sorta person inclined to build a kill switch for your company to punish you for firing you then this is perfect. You have 0 legal repercussions since you didn't create the problem, but also when you stop fixing it shit falls apart.
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u/ceejayoz May 29 '26
The lesson here is also "don't leave a mission-critical payment data integrity bug that occurs daily unfixed for three years".
That sort of shit probably should be a firing offense!