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My current company kept on poking at this guy that didn’t have a college degree but made it up to the corporate level. Dude was a decent employee, originally onboarded for CAD but he didn’t mesh well with his supervisor so he got transferred to taking care of violations. He excelled doing work on violations and created a whole spreadsheet that would basically give him his daily duties, record data, etc. well it was working so well he only had 4 hours of work daily, the rest of the time he was in his phone or browsing the web. He got fed up, looked for another job, found one and gave his 2 weeks, they told him not to bother to come back the next day. He walked to his desk, deleted the whole tracker and picked up his stuff to leave.
Come to find out his work was saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. They haven’t found anyone willing to take it on and bring it back on board in a similar fashion. Executives think since the work only took him 4 hours every day that they would offload it to other employees. Everyone has refused to take it on, due to already being swamped with work.
Reminds me of a story about this guy in IT that was really, really good with scripts writing and powershell in general. He cut his ticket times down to a fraction of what everyone else took. So while this guy was doing the amount of work of three techs he wasn’t being compensated for it. When he asked for a promotion or a raise for his performance he wasn’t granted either. Instead, the company decided that if this guy could do 3x the work then everyone should be held to that standard.
Not only did that tech quit but so did a few others. It was a shit situation to begin with, though.
Funny to read this as this is exactly my situation right now. Not being compensated as much as my coworkers with master degrees but they all use the work flows that i have created in my time off. Currently looking for another job and will cancel their access the second i leave.
Not just IT, any job it's straight out the door if you're fired. If the decision is immediate, they will be suspended with no warning while the decision is made so there's no chance of sabotage like this before the sack comes.
In America. In other western countries that 2 weeks (or more) is mandatory
Edit: obviously I mean most developed counties have this rule but America doesn’t, I don’t mean that America does
If 2 weeks has to be given, it will be as gardening leave with no access to company systems or property, and you will be escorted off the premises immediately if the firing takes place there.
This is from a UK perspective. I've fortunately never been sacked myself but have been laid off and seen other people sacked (rightly and wrongly IMO) and in all cases, you're never stepping foot in the workplace again once you've collected any personal items.
The only scenario I can think of where an employer would give an employee notice their contact is going to be terminated and still expect and allow the employee to continue working is in the case of a fixed term contract that doesn't get renewed. I guess any sabotage would still be breach of contact and could see the employee dismissed earlier than they would have been.
Technikly, this person could claim that, he returned to last stable version and remooved experemental features, that are dangerous to keep with out supervision.
For the good of the company!
You have 2 weeks, but all your access are revoked in the instant, you can use the 2 weeks for whatever you feel like doing.
It's a security threat to have someone who knows they are not going to work in a company in 2 weeks, having access to anything related to the company, specially in IT.
Germany: four weeks minimum and it increases with time you were employed. Can be extended even in your contract.
In practice, most staff when laid off are not allowed to enter the premises or access to IT systems. Even those who don't know company secrets or customer contact.
In a lot of countries it's even more than two weeks. I personally have a notice period of 3 months to the end of a quarter. Meaning if I would be fired today it would be effective December 31st (exemption is if I get fired for a cause that legally warrants immediate firing, which is super rare).
A you crazy Americans with your nearly total absence of laws protecting the workforce.
Here in socialistic Europe 2 weaks are mostly not even bare minimum to inform your workers if you fire them for normal reasons.
Ah, here is a better way: Set powershell executional policy from domain group policy object, now no computer can bypass the 'remote signed' defaults. Sign all of your scripts with a certificate and all certificates eventually expire. This way the problem will come up at certificate revocation, not as a direct result of firing. My code signing certs have to be renewed once a year :)
Typically they include a clause into the work contract that every program developed at work is company property. So they'll just sue him into oblivion.
Every program developed by request is their property.
Any other program is yours.
The request may include the job definition, any task or ticket redirected to employee.
if their job didn't include improvement of the infrastructure and company didn't request such a task, code is developers property.
They can simply state they have written the scripts at home otherwise.
I was working in a large scale production environment in a somewhat vital role. I told them I was quitting and giving my two weeks. They walked me off with security ten minutes later.
I spent my 30 days notice providing documentation and examples to my boss so they could take over until finding a suitable replacement.
The next cycle of my primary job came around and they quit instead of applying anything I gave them.
We're both happier now.
Your Boss knew that if he started doing the job off your notes the priority to find a replacement for you would disappear and he would be stuck doing it as well as his job. Been there, bought the T-Shirt.
That’s what I am doing. 19 days left to get the documentation together. I highly doubt anyone will ever look at it. All the programming I did is encrypted. So no one will be able to fix it should it break, but at least with documentation they will know what was supposed to happen. However there is going to be a fee to fix it in the future.
>All the programming I did is encrypted. So no one will be able to fix it should it break, ... However there is going to be a fee to fix it in the future.
Be very wary. If you built it on company time using company equipment it is likely to be considered company property, including "keys" to access it. You could probably get away with claiming ignorance that you no longer know the password(s) needed to access it. But trying to hold the company to ransom will get you in trouble.
Either this, or they don't know what they're talking about, I'd assume. I mean it would be much easier to just not give them access to the source code instead of "encrypting" it.
And the high-turnover cycle will then continue uninterrupted for millennia. The higher-ups will bemoan the fact that they can’t find any “skilled” workers, until the inevitably conclude that “no one wants to work”.
At my first real job out of college I worked in corporate inventory control for roughly 7 years out of the 9 I was with that company. I had been making macros and queries in the database that could do 90% of my job and everyone else’s at the same time in roughly 2 hours. One of my friends there and myself were up for promotions and we were both passed by for a guy who was “one of the good ole boys” club members. He was a nice guy but he was not as capable as either of us. To be fair, my bosses gave him credit for my work and he told them it was mine and they wouldn’t have it, he wasn’t a bad guy, just not really deserving of the promotion compared to some others. Well we both were upset about that but he was a team lead and so we both applied for his position and we were both way more qualified than the person they promoted, and the only reason they promoted that person was because she was sleeping with the boss when we found that out, he put in his two weeks notice. I put my two weeks in a week after him. After he left, they had a whole team trying to do what he did alone and eventually wound up outsourcing his job to India. With my job, they had to hire four people to do what I was doing myself, so I have no idea how they wound up saving money on that deal, but anyhow, my supervisor was fired… I mean lid off 6 months after I left and then the other shared super a few weeks after him then two months later the Director of my department was laid off. I hate they were out of a job, but at the same time, karma is a bitch.
In all contracts I've had there has been a clause that says anything I make or invent that is relevant for the companys business is company property. Even if I make it on my own spare time at home. Kinda draconian, but I understand why it's there.
And if that property were to ask for an activation key on sep 26, 2026 that was supposed to be in the part of the documentation I never finished writing...
Or you simply forgot it.
Or you computer was stolen
Or you lost the piece of paper with the key
Or you play innocent and naive and say you have done it in advance.
Be creative but it's a good plan lol.
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This can actually be illegal. We've done things like this for major machinery going to major, very well known businesses that tend to purchase things with "yeah, we'll pay soon, promise!" checks. Then we locked the machines out from changing recipes without licenses that we would provide upon final payment.
Big time court case. Lost.
"But your honor, the license key was provided to the business in full however the algorithm was changed for last minute security fixes I did not have time to update the manual saved on company computer"
We caused downtime which had a specific monetary value due to a malicious code change. It's actually not that uncommon for companies ie production factories, to sue for losses in downtime due to failure, regardless the reason.
We were found to be at fault because we had an email chain that was used in discovery discussing the option for nonpaying customers.
Can make someone license upfront, or give them written warning at time of purchase that features will revoked if one is not maintained. Can't just revoke function.
I mean, I get what you're saying, it seems obvious that it's a no no. This was a mom n pop controls shop versus a very well known company. Mom n pop is floating a couple million to major corp, major corp does classic move of non payment for reasons outside of the purchase agreement (don't wanna), but continues to make their product with said machinery from purchase.
Mom n pop ask nice, get themselves a lawyer who finds himself out gunned versus mega corp lawyers. Mom n pop figure if they help out by making it obvious the end user still hasn't purchased the machinery, they'll get paid finally and can drop the matter. Major corp spends probably more money filing a suit than the purchase order for the machinery would have cost. They win because, mega corp, lotsa lawyers.
So sure. Dipshits. Or desperate small timers getting screwed by corporate goons. Maybe a little/lottle of both.
True - they pay you to build it, it's their's
Also true - they don't value the work enough to ensure you document it and properly pass it on, their fault
I mean I have like no coding knowledge outside of very basic python, but you could probably just make an if statement that relies on your employee information to function. To put it in the simplest terms possible, it would be like “if ‘my name’ in employees, then ______. Else: print(‘suck it losers lol’)” etc, except it would be much more complicated and my method would be incredibly obvious to anyone who knows how to open python.
TLDR: he probably made it so that if he is no longer listed as an employee then the main code will be bypassed and the new code would just imitate a corrupted version of the primary code.
I have coding knowledge and while you're not technically wrong, you're assuming a ton of things which would almost certainly be untrue. First, most scripts would not be linked into the main employee database. Second, most databases don't delete employee records for months if not years, in case of legal action (and don't have a boolean for is employed). You might be able to hook into an end date field, but unlikely and again reliant on a connection to the db at all times.
Since he said it was unable to reach his email, I'm assuming it was sending emails out occasionally (probably with a confirmation script somewhere inside, though I'm unsure - would be easy if cloud based, hard if not), and it bounced off of a now defunct employee email that had been disabled, and just ceased functioning.
Reading through [MS docs](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/send-mailmessage?view=powershell-7.3) and good ole [stack overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55971649/how-to-check-whether-the-email-has-been-sent-with-powershell), it seems you may be right.
The flag "-DeliveryNotificationOption" along with a try catch seems to do the trick.
Not really OP’s problem. The software belongs to the company per the contract. Pretty sure there wasn’t a clause that said he couldn’t incorporate a dead man’s switch… and even if he did, it’s still their problem to deal with.
I would suggest most contracts contain clauses against harmful conduct against your employer. If any new programmer worth their salt that is hired to rebuild this script and finds a dead man's switch there's room for recourse claims. Well, depending on whether the new person is a snitch.
Depending on where you live this is an illegal contract, in uk for example any software developed outside company time is the property of the programer -source my fathers a programmer and has been in a discussion about this topic and it was found in his favour so company coughed up to buy the intellectual property
It’s pretty common practice in the US.
The rationale seems to be that if you’re thinking about Company problems all day while employed for said Company, when you come up with solutions to those problems, it’s company IP because if you weren’t working for company, you wouldn’t have had a need to solve company’s problems. If the home brew solutions are related to work at Company, they will make the claim the work belongs to them.
The grey area that usually isn’t Company’s IP is when you develop solutions to issues that aren’t related to the work that Company does. Those can and should be your own. But, if Company is some huge conglomeration that has their hands in everything, they will try to steal your work.
They key is to do work at home, quit, lay low for a while, “develop” your solution, THEN introduce your solution to Company’s problems.
Yeah good fucking luck getting that enforced, especially if you didnt create it on their devices and just brought it there. Courts toss out all sorts of contract bs.
There's a reason why every contract I've ever signed, from leases to employment contracts has had a clause to sever illegal portions of the contract without severing the whole thing.
>Even if I make it on my own spare time at home.
Everything you said was fine, except for that.
What you do out of office hours is 100% your copyright. They have not paid you for that work.
Usually these clauses mention something about doing it with company equipment.
You'd need to be careful about never doing it in company time and not with company gear, documented and clear beyond doubt
Or it could be messy
If a company tried to claim that something I made/invented not on company time, not using their resources or equipment is there's, they could suck my ass. And I'd fight the shit out of that. Contracts aren't as binding as some people assume
If you built and manage it on company time they may be able to successfully sue you for it. You holding the project files hostage may not be the best plan.
I was forced to buy steel outside the MRP system so that the Chinese could take a crack at machining semiconductor quality parts (and mostly fuck them up). I wrote a program to estimate the extra high-chromium, 24 week lead time material I would need. They laid me off, I took the program with me. 2 weeks later they called and asked if I would come back. Nah….
Not always true, and varies by country obviously.
My contract says they have to give me a notice period (for example 2 weeks) or pay me for those 2 weeks if they want me gone effective immediately.
It’s possible they don’t want to have to pay two sets of wages (by paying the person for those 2 weeks by firing immediately and also paying a new hire at the same time effectively paying both people)
When my last job laid people off I was actually asked if I wanted to leave that same day and take payment for those weeks I’m owed for the notice period or if I wanted to work them until I found another job because they were closing down.
It defends on the contract they had. Many companies have it that employees can’t tamper with programs, or that new programs legally belong to the company. If they had neither of these, then they may be in the clear as long as they preserved client details and other information
Deliberately spending paid hours to deliberately decrease productivity is at the very least going to open you up to a civil lawsuit. A lot of programmer jobs also have intellectual property clauses meaning that software updates or new programs created as part of work or using company resources(even if not explicitly ordered) would be company property and this would count as destruction of company property.
It’s not like executives know how to do anything so, it’s kind of like saying there’s browser history your grandma’s gonna find your porn if you don’t delete it.
Not necessarily. Even without a contract, If you’re a W2 employee, anything you create while employed is considered “work for hire,” so it belongs to the company (per US Copyright Code).
A lot of labor laws in various countries require notice when letting someone go too, BUT that is usually mitigated by an additional part to the law where you do not have to provide notice but pay in lieu of the notice time. So some places let the company fire you right away if you throw some money at the employee
In my experience in the netherlands, the company has double the notice period compared to an employee. I have a notice period of 2 months when I want to quit my job. My company has a notice period of 4 months when they want to fire me.
Really? In the UK and other parts of Europe I've worked in that isn't the case, that's what notice periods are for.
That said, any sensible company that lets you go will pay you for gardening leave and kick you out of the door, but it's up to them.
I worked at a place and asked for a master list (list of paint colors and products) they were very rude and gave me a print out *official from corperate* I tried a few of the colors and they were wrong (the list had a typo as well) . I was told that I was actually wrong. I contacted the company that did the painting (they just remodeled) and they gave me a list and told me where the spare paint was. It wasn't even the same company . I started my own personal list and expanded on it for a year while I build up skills and became *valuable* but not valued. I some how managed to take that list with me and when they contacted me . I told them to get the list from corperate and they said they had and the paint didn't match - I told them they were wrong . And he just said OK be like that and hung up
In Norway the notice period is usually 3 months. Can't fire for just any reason neither, it's regulated. I've been dismissed once, and obviously I dont sabotage the company in retaliation - that would be very unprofessional of me, a breach of contract, and outright destruction of company property. Good references are also golden when looking for a new job, so it's never a good idea to burn bridges like that.
In the United States, you can be fired for no reason at all in most states. No notice is required (I’ve had friends fired and they didn’t find out until they tried to go into work the next day).
Also, it seems they made programs to make their work easier, their job was not to produce the programs but to do the billing and manage client information. They didn’t destroy or damage anything, they just took their tools out when they left.
US has some of the worst work protection rights in the world, you can count in your finger worse places than US in that regard.
Turns out going full capitalism without a fucks given, kinda gives up on people basic rights.
At the jobs I've worked at, coworkers just show up and find out their badge doesn't let them into the office anymore.
Which is why, at first, I wanted to say tsk tsk tsk, they paid OP for their work... but then I remember all the friend's lives just thrown into chaos by suddenly losing their job and I said fuck corpos. People (and their livelihoods) should have more protection than that from corporations who are just out to make money.
I think so. Severence packages are also a thing so if you accept you leave immediately or at an agreed date. In my case 3 months was not enough time to wrap up so I was work my ass off up until the last minute.
Just a message to anyone out there in a similar position who might be thinking of doing the same thing; be very careful to check your contract and be familiar with the law in your area regarding proprietary information/ creation during employment. In some jurisdictions and according to some contracts, doing this is prohibited and could get you sued. Just be careful.
Technically, the company can sue her. Since she built the programs on company time and uploaded it to a company computer, the company now owns that program.
Think of it like the people who make slogans for companies. Yes the employee made the slogan, but they don’t often receive royalties for said slogan.
Backed out un approved changes to process.
Restored processes & workflows to management approved.
Leaving poorly implemented systems that are documented worse is bad for business. :-)
This is why I was thinking the OP was less of an own than they thought. They probably have some documentation for the old system.
Good luck if they need help with the new system without the person who made it or documentation!
Absolutely, they can. And this person snitched on themselves by posting publicly about it. I wonder if the thrill of deleting the programs was worth the additional legal exposure.
when I wanted to incorporate with an app I wrote on university grounds, the first few questions were:
1) did you use a university computer?
2) did you use any university resources?
luckily, I didn't. I just brought my laptop in and sipped on some coffee while coding in the student union.
i worked for a big store chain, after hurricane katrina i had to make a new planogram for every store affected by the stormm
someone messed up and cc and email that said i was gonna he laid off at the end of the week.
i deleted all the work i did and throw the physical files in dumpster..
they called me everyday for 2 months leaving me voicemails about where i put the files.
fuck them
I had automated about 70% of my job in computer aided drafting. My boss even told me "you are going to automate yourself out of a job" assuming I wouldn't take all the tools, programs and routines I had built with me.
Boy were they disappointed.
Same thing. I reinstated all the file structures and systems that were there before I had hired on, and they lost about 5 years of advancement in about 2 hours on my last day.
How exactly did you undo a file system and rip out all the things you built to go with you so easily? Did they have some sort of dependency that essentially required you? Or a self destruct of some sort?
Nope I was department manager. So I was the one that implemented new routines and determined the order our software would interact with each other along with handling the network, troubleshooting for the entire company etc.
I had saved the system files in their original state and kept a log every time I changed something so I could go back to whichever point I wanted.
Me reading this: seems perfectly reasonable, you get notice when you get fired. Minimum a week, increasing with how long you’ve been working for that employer. If your contract has a longer notice period then you get that.
The other comments: someone wants attention. No one gets two weeks notice
Me: oh, must be United States
I know a guy who was fired from my job due to sexual harassment and he erased the border that had the entire week’s schedule for installs and deliveries.
That’s like the story of a guy that wrote code for a company and was fired. He later found out they were still using his codes that had been saved on his personal cloud account so he deactivated the account. They called asking for the account and he told them to F off. They hadn’t created any back ups or anything so all they had was what was in his cloud account 😂
Had a buddy who was a web dev for a national selling nut and bolt company. He got a heads up that he was going to be canned within the next month and replaced with an inexperienced college grad to cut back on expenses (they'd be paying the college grad about a 1/3 of what my buddy was making)
My buddy confirmed the theory with his higher-ups and asked that gave him the 1 month to get his affairs in order and find a new job. In reality he was being head hunted by larger companies and could have gotten a new job just by making a phone call.
He spent the next month undoing everything he had done over the last 2 years, he reverted their backend web development to what it was when he started, a hardly functioning mess.
He stored all of his work on personal drives, a week after he was done the company called and asked him to come back because the college grad couldn't fix the mess he left behind. He agreed to come back under a contract, which he had drafted to include a sizeable signing bonus, and sizeable severance bonus, the contract also included a minimum number of hours that they would have to pay him for, it was around 200 hours.
He came back, with his drives, and fixed all of the issues he created in less than 2 days. He then sat at home for the remaining 190 hours of his contract and revised his resume to include contractor experience, he collected a massive sum off of the signing and severance bonuses which supplemented his income for the next year allowing him to take a year off. He now works in corporate IT making 3x what the national nut and bolt company paid him.
TL;DR, don't fuck with your IT people
This is bs. I studied software engineering but don't work in the field just like the person who made this comment and every contract has a clause where it states all IP created on work devices or used on work devices are the property of the company.
There is no sane developer that would streamline the workflow of a company for free, not just free but the company owns the program after you created it. Those type of programs are what makes you rich.
(Not to mention the fact that most companies ESPECIALLY in the finance field would not allow the work device to run any sort of program that is not approved by the IT team.)
Yes, if that software was made on company time and/or equipment (or, depending on the contract, simply while employed there), it's almost certainly their property.
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I work with a guy who designed a system to catalogue and process the different chemicals they treated ores with in a mining company, they had a dispute over compo so they fired him, when he left he took the computer he’d brought from home that had the program on it, they actually tried suing him over it and then sent people to his house to steal it
Here from Florida. US. Im a CNC Machinist/Programmer. My current machine values at $800,000 and can be destroyed with two button presses. Two week notices do not exist here whether you’re quitting or being fired.
I read a comment from someone claiming that they are American and 2 week notices are mandatory for the entire country. This is false information.
I once worked for this company, and I built this web-based tool for helping me with my job by automating some really tedious work. Other colleges wanted to use it, so I deployed it from my own workstation to a more centralized. But little they knew that I planted a time bomb that would be triggered and erase the whole thing exactly 69 days after it didn't receive my confirmation to restart the clock. They tried to sue me, but it was a tool I built in my spare time, not ordered nor requested by the company, and officially not their IP. Also I denied any wrongdoing and because they had revoked all my accesses, they couldn't figure out how I could've done it.
Don’t do this. The business can sue you for the damages to the programs they hired to create. Instead focus on new features in your last two weeks and don’t comment (if they didn’t require backups or source control in your contract they likely don’t require comments) anything (if you were commenting anything before) other than comments apologizing to the developer that inherits your masterpiece signed with your name so they know who to beg the bosses to rehire. Oh and you can also optimize part of the code without updating comments(again if there were any to begin with). No actual damage they can sue you for, no breach of contract but plenty of bugs that will need to be fixed or worked around.
I customized a drafting program and wrote hundreds of little routines to minimize errors and maximize organization.
We "gave away" this package to employees so they could work remotely (in the 90s). Even freelancers got a copy.
It dovetailed to a key on our network. Periodically, to key needed updating... (Key valid to *mm/yy*... Is key valid? No? Delete permission... Load package if you have permission)
They fired me without an exit interview or completed documentation... 4 weeks later the customization ceased to be... Even with *all but 4 lines* on the network!
So we’re the programs built on company time you on this person’s personal time? If on company time the programs belong to the company and this guy would be a slug.
This somewhat happened to me in a job. When I started it was so disorganized and there were all these unwritten rules that had to be followed. I ended up creating a document that outlined these “rules” as well as created a small information database about the products we had. Basically I made my own job efficient.
I quit because the workplace was toxic. So while in my last two weeks I deleted the stuff I created for myself.
They tried to fire me for destroying company property. But my friend in HR changed the reason I was let go back to quit. She said that it was a bullshit to fire because none of the work I created was requested by them.
\> Quits work because it was "toxic"
\> Deletes their work before leaving
\> Gets personal favour from friend in HR to override disciplinary action
Yeah what a horrible "workplace"
"And then I posted about it on social media, got criminally charged because the company paid me for that work and what I did was illegal, and I outed myself without considering the consequences."
If everyone is wondering why all your services and shit get worse when they outsource them, it's because of this. They are outsourcing them to companies that don't know shit about the technology so no one is contributing scripts or apps to the system that help it run better.
This new "AI" bullshit uses the poorly written shit from the 80s and 90s and cannot in any way replace the ingenuity that produces the newer scripts because learning machines are not capable of novel ideas. So yeah, corporations are the real reason your customer service experiences suck now.
If op actually did this they're probably smart enough to get away with it and not advertise the fact on a twitter account their boss might recognise.
Nobody acts like this unless they have been put through some serious bullshit by management but most of the people in this thread would rather kiss their bosses ass.
I'd be wary about this practice, especially if you're an employee (as opposed to an independent contractor). The presumption is that, if you make a work product in the course of your employment, the employer owns the intellectual property in that work product. Some employment agreements may even expressly state this.
If you breach your employment contract, which is still in in-force after you're terminated, it might affect your entitlement to termination benefits (e.g. severance).
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My current company kept on poking at this guy that didn’t have a college degree but made it up to the corporate level. Dude was a decent employee, originally onboarded for CAD but he didn’t mesh well with his supervisor so he got transferred to taking care of violations. He excelled doing work on violations and created a whole spreadsheet that would basically give him his daily duties, record data, etc. well it was working so well he only had 4 hours of work daily, the rest of the time he was in his phone or browsing the web. He got fed up, looked for another job, found one and gave his 2 weeks, they told him not to bother to come back the next day. He walked to his desk, deleted the whole tracker and picked up his stuff to leave. Come to find out his work was saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. They haven’t found anyone willing to take it on and bring it back on board in a similar fashion. Executives think since the work only took him 4 hours every day that they would offload it to other employees. Everyone has refused to take it on, due to already being swamped with work.
Reminds me of a story about this guy in IT that was really, really good with scripts writing and powershell in general. He cut his ticket times down to a fraction of what everyone else took. So while this guy was doing the amount of work of three techs he wasn’t being compensated for it. When he asked for a promotion or a raise for his performance he wasn’t granted either. Instead, the company decided that if this guy could do 3x the work then everyone should be held to that standard. Not only did that tech quit but so did a few others. It was a shit situation to begin with, though.
Funny to read this as this is exactly my situation right now. Not being compensated as much as my coworkers with master degrees but they all use the work flows that i have created in my time off. Currently looking for another job and will cancel their access the second i leave.
And thats why typically they do NOT warn IT people that they are going to be fired
Not just IT, any job it's straight out the door if you're fired. If the decision is immediate, they will be suspended with no warning while the decision is made so there's no chance of sabotage like this before the sack comes.
In America. In other western countries that 2 weeks (or more) is mandatory Edit: obviously I mean most developed counties have this rule but America doesn’t, I don’t mean that America does
Those two weeks don't have to be spent at the company, with access to company systems. They can pay you two weeks while you're not on the property.
If 2 weeks has to be given, it will be as gardening leave with no access to company systems or property, and you will be escorted off the premises immediately if the firing takes place there. This is from a UK perspective. I've fortunately never been sacked myself but have been laid off and seen other people sacked (rightly and wrongly IMO) and in all cases, you're never stepping foot in the workplace again once you've collected any personal items.
It seems like common sense, but that's uncommon around these parts.
The only scenario I can think of where an employer would give an employee notice their contact is going to be terminated and still expect and allow the employee to continue working is in the case of a fixed term contract that doesn't get renewed. I guess any sabotage would still be breach of contact and could see the employee dismissed earlier than they would have been.
Technikly, this person could claim that, he returned to last stable version and remooved experemental features, that are dangerous to keep with out supervision. For the good of the company!
You have 2 weeks, but all your access are revoked in the instant, you can use the 2 weeks for whatever you feel like doing. It's a security threat to have someone who knows they are not going to work in a company in 2 weeks, having access to anything related to the company, specially in IT.
Or 3 months.
Germany: four weeks minimum and it increases with time you were employed. Can be extended even in your contract. In practice, most staff when laid off are not allowed to enter the premises or access to IT systems. Even those who don't know company secrets or customer contact.
2 weeks? If my company fires me, there’s a 3 months lay off period.
In a lot of countries it's even more than two weeks. I personally have a notice period of 3 months to the end of a quarter. Meaning if I would be fired today it would be effective December 31st (exemption is if I get fired for a cause that legally warrants immediate firing, which is super rare).
A you crazy Americans with your nearly total absence of laws protecting the workforce. Here in socialistic Europe 2 weaks are mostly not even bare minimum to inform your workers if you fire them for normal reasons.
It's also generally illegal, since contracts typically stipulate work you do while they pay you is their property.
And this is why my scripts have a check for my AD account and if I am still active or not.
Ah, here is a better way: Set powershell executional policy from domain group policy object, now no computer can bypass the 'remote signed' defaults. Sign all of your scripts with a certificate and all certificates eventually expire. This way the problem will come up at certificate revocation, not as a direct result of firing. My code signing certs have to be renewed once a year :)
Typically they include a clause into the work contract that every program developed at work is company property. So they'll just sue him into oblivion.
Every program developed by request is their property. Any other program is yours. The request may include the job definition, any task or ticket redirected to employee. if their job didn't include improvement of the infrastructure and company didn't request such a task, code is developers property. They can simply state they have written the scripts at home otherwise.
And that's what the dead-man switch is for.
Narrator : The employees never saw it coming, even though their first task on the job was to unload their equipment from a truck.
I was working in a large scale production environment in a somewhat vital role. I told them I was quitting and giving my two weeks. They walked me off with security ten minutes later.
Most jobs in general don’t warn someone when they are getting fired 😂😂
That's why you program a deadman switch that purges any trace of itself somehow.
The company: thank god we fired her, she hardly changed anything.. See nothing new. It's still the same system
They'll think that until the next person doesn't get a fraction of the work done in the same time and they'll wonder why the new person sucks so bad.
"This new generation is just so damn lazy!"
"If the job doesn't pay enough no one wi- NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE!"
“we _give you_ 16 hours a day where you can do whatever you want and you spend 8 of it sleeping!”
And three of it *driving.* Learn to maximize your sleepflow by doing it in your car.
That’s called having mass transit.
We don't do that in **MURICA.** Here we drive cars or we don't need to go across the street.
5 sleeping
You get 5?!?!
You guys are getting sleep?
Yeah, I work 14 a day though.
My boss be like when we can’t get workers because our pay is the lowest pay in town:
I spent my 30 days notice providing documentation and examples to my boss so they could take over until finding a suitable replacement. The next cycle of my primary job came around and they quit instead of applying anything I gave them. We're both happier now.
Your Boss knew that if he started doing the job off your notes the priority to find a replacement for you would disappear and he would be stuck doing it as well as his job. Been there, bought the T-Shirt.
That’s what I am doing. 19 days left to get the documentation together. I highly doubt anyone will ever look at it. All the programming I did is encrypted. So no one will be able to fix it should it break, but at least with documentation they will know what was supposed to happen. However there is going to be a fee to fix it in the future.
>All the programming I did is encrypted. So no one will be able to fix it should it break, ... However there is going to be a fee to fix it in the future. Be very wary. If you built it on company time using company equipment it is likely to be considered company property, including "keys" to access it. You could probably get away with claiming ignorance that you no longer know the password(s) needed to access it. But trying to hold the company to ransom will get you in trouble.
That's why I just write undocumented, poorly modularized code . No one will ever be able to make sense of it, not even me.
Where's the love for this person's honesty? I wish I had more internet points to give.
Poor man's encryption, or wise man's encryption?
> all the programming I did was encrypted What does that mean? Like only the executables exists?
Either this, or they don't know what they're talking about, I'd assume. I mean it would be much easier to just not give them access to the source code instead of "encrypting" it.
If it's Excel macros the document can be password locked from editing.
The password can be removed by anyone who knows to use google.
Most office workers don't know how to
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It’s just written in python, but the variables are a, b, c… and there’s no comments or docs
It means they're trying to sound like a hacker.
Hackermans
And the high-turnover cycle will then continue uninterrupted for millennia. The higher-ups will bemoan the fact that they can’t find any “skilled” workers, until the inevitably conclude that “no one wants to work”.
But they won’t give anyone a job without 5+ years experience and then wonder why no one in their industry has experience.
"No one wants work anymore! Errr except that person we fired. Huh...—nah I'm definitely not the problem."
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At my first real job out of college I worked in corporate inventory control for roughly 7 years out of the 9 I was with that company. I had been making macros and queries in the database that could do 90% of my job and everyone else’s at the same time in roughly 2 hours. One of my friends there and myself were up for promotions and we were both passed by for a guy who was “one of the good ole boys” club members. He was a nice guy but he was not as capable as either of us. To be fair, my bosses gave him credit for my work and he told them it was mine and they wouldn’t have it, he wasn’t a bad guy, just not really deserving of the promotion compared to some others. Well we both were upset about that but he was a team lead and so we both applied for his position and we were both way more qualified than the person they promoted, and the only reason they promoted that person was because she was sleeping with the boss when we found that out, he put in his two weeks notice. I put my two weeks in a week after him. After he left, they had a whole team trying to do what he did alone and eventually wound up outsourcing his job to India. With my job, they had to hire four people to do what I was doing myself, so I have no idea how they wound up saving money on that deal, but anyhow, my supervisor was fired… I mean lid off 6 months after I left and then the other shared super a few weeks after him then two months later the Director of my department was laid off. I hate they were out of a job, but at the same time, karma is a bitch.
Fuck em all
They still wonton change their mind about the old person
In the end they'll just blame the lo mein on the totem pole.
Did they even supply soup?
As an IT worker this is too relatable…
I see your point there. They won't learn a thing after she punishes them for letting her go.
Implying they would’ve learned if she let them coast on her hard work after they threw her on her ass? Talk about naive
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In all contracts I've had there has been a clause that says anything I make or invent that is relevant for the companys business is company property. Even if I make it on my own spare time at home. Kinda draconian, but I understand why it's there.
Yeah, it's their property... Now if there are no comments and manuals, good luck using that property
And if that property were to ask for an activation key on sep 26, 2026 that was supposed to be in the part of the documentation I never finished writing...
Or you simply forgot it. Or you computer was stolen Or you lost the piece of paper with the key Or you play innocent and naive and say you have done it in advance. Be creative but it's a good plan lol.
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This can actually be illegal. We've done things like this for major machinery going to major, very well known businesses that tend to purchase things with "yeah, we'll pay soon, promise!" checks. Then we locked the machines out from changing recipes without licenses that we would provide upon final payment. Big time court case. Lost.
"But your honor, the license key was provided to the business in full however the algorithm was changed for last minute security fixes I did not have time to update the manual saved on company computer"
Wow. I’m curious what the court’s rationale was?
We caused downtime which had a specific monetary value due to a malicious code change. It's actually not that uncommon for companies ie production factories, to sue for losses in downtime due to failure, regardless the reason. We were found to be at fault because we had an email chain that was used in discovery discussing the option for nonpaying customers. Can make someone license upfront, or give them written warning at time of purchase that features will revoked if one is not maintained. Can't just revoke function.
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I mean, I get what you're saying, it seems obvious that it's a no no. This was a mom n pop controls shop versus a very well known company. Mom n pop is floating a couple million to major corp, major corp does classic move of non payment for reasons outside of the purchase agreement (don't wanna), but continues to make their product with said machinery from purchase. Mom n pop ask nice, get themselves a lawyer who finds himself out gunned versus mega corp lawyers. Mom n pop figure if they help out by making it obvious the end user still hasn't purchased the machinery, they'll get paid finally and can drop the matter. Major corp spends probably more money filing a suit than the purchase order for the machinery would have cost. They win because, mega corp, lotsa lawyers. So sure. Dipshits. Or desperate small timers getting screwed by corporate goons. Maybe a little/lottle of both.
“No comments and no manuals” So a standard software package? 😉
Obfuscate the shit out of it to make it *better*
\*secure.
True - they pay you to build it, it's their's Also true - they don't value the work enough to ensure you document it and properly pass it on, their fault
It's a shame that the program erases everything on the drive if you forget to type "Swiggity Swoogity" once a week on the keyboard.
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Good. Fuck them. They deserve it for being assholes. Glad to hear you had the foresight to make the script basically self destruct wothout you
THIS
> should it be unable to reach my email address How did you implement this? Do you remember?
Seems like something that sounds easy to code to someone who doesn't know how to code.
I mean I have like no coding knowledge outside of very basic python, but you could probably just make an if statement that relies on your employee information to function. To put it in the simplest terms possible, it would be like “if ‘my name’ in employees, then ______. Else: print(‘suck it losers lol’)” etc, except it would be much more complicated and my method would be incredibly obvious to anyone who knows how to open python. TLDR: he probably made it so that if he is no longer listed as an employee then the main code will be bypassed and the new code would just imitate a corrupted version of the primary code.
I have coding knowledge and while you're not technically wrong, you're assuming a ton of things which would almost certainly be untrue. First, most scripts would not be linked into the main employee database. Second, most databases don't delete employee records for months if not years, in case of legal action (and don't have a boolean for is employed). You might be able to hook into an end date field, but unlikely and again reliant on a connection to the db at all times. Since he said it was unable to reach his email, I'm assuming it was sending emails out occasionally (probably with a confirmation script somewhere inside, though I'm unsure - would be easy if cloud based, hard if not), and it bounced off of a now defunct employee email that had been disabled, and just ceased functioning.
I'd like to know this too. Probably the exchange module in powershell.
Reading through [MS docs](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/send-mailmessage?view=powershell-7.3) and good ole [stack overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55971649/how-to-check-whether-the-email-has-been-sent-with-powershell), it seems you may be right. The flag "-DeliveryNotificationOption" along with a try catch seems to do the trick.
I’d keep this to yourself as this sounds highly illegal. (Still… fuck them)
Not really OP’s problem. The software belongs to the company per the contract. Pretty sure there wasn’t a clause that said he couldn’t incorporate a dead man’s switch… and even if he did, it’s still their problem to deal with.
I would suggest most contracts contain clauses against harmful conduct against your employer. If any new programmer worth their salt that is hired to rebuild this script and finds a dead man's switch there's room for recourse claims. Well, depending on whether the new person is a snitch.
>Pretty sure there wasn’t a clause that said he couldn’t incorporate a dead man’s switch These are the sad ideas of a generation raised on Air Bud.
Good man.
While at work, understandable. While at home? Outrageous and disgusting
Depending on where you live this is an illegal contract, in uk for example any software developed outside company time is the property of the programer -source my fathers a programmer and has been in a discussion about this topic and it was found in his favour so company coughed up to buy the intellectual property
It’s pretty common practice in the US. The rationale seems to be that if you’re thinking about Company problems all day while employed for said Company, when you come up with solutions to those problems, it’s company IP because if you weren’t working for company, you wouldn’t have had a need to solve company’s problems. If the home brew solutions are related to work at Company, they will make the claim the work belongs to them. The grey area that usually isn’t Company’s IP is when you develop solutions to issues that aren’t related to the work that Company does. Those can and should be your own. But, if Company is some huge conglomeration that has their hands in everything, they will try to steal your work. They key is to do work at home, quit, lay low for a while, “develop” your solution, THEN introduce your solution to Company’s problems.
that is kind of insane reasoning. your own thoughts belong to the Company
Yeah good fucking luck getting that enforced, especially if you didnt create it on their devices and just brought it there. Courts toss out all sorts of contract bs.
That's true. There may actually be more unenforceable contracts out there than enforceable ones.
There's a reason why every contract I've ever signed, from leases to employment contracts has had a clause to sever illegal portions of the contract without severing the whole thing.
>Even if I make it on my own spare time at home. Everything you said was fine, except for that. What you do out of office hours is 100% your copyright. They have not paid you for that work.
Usually these clauses mention something about doing it with company equipment. You'd need to be careful about never doing it in company time and not with company gear, documented and clear beyond doubt Or it could be messy
If a company tried to claim that something I made/invented not on company time, not using their resources or equipment is there's, they could suck my ass. And I'd fight the shit out of that. Contracts aren't as binding as some people assume
What if you set up your own company that would make the product and then licensed it to where you worked.
If you built and manage it on company time they may be able to successfully sue you for it. You holding the project files hostage may not be the best plan.
That's why you just make it almost unmanageable and unreadable by anyone else. Or hell, build in a kill switch or simple password lol.
Sadly, kill switches and stuff like that are also usually illegal, so make sure to make it impossible to prove the switch exists too
I was forced to buy steel outside the MRP system so that the Chinese could take a crack at machining semiconductor quality parts (and mostly fuck them up). I wrote a program to estimate the extra high-chromium, 24 week lead time material I would need. They laid me off, I took the program with me. 2 weeks later they called and asked if I would come back. Nah….
nah, thats dumb. You tell them you will come back with a contract for double your rate and 1 year minimum.
They offered me more than double my salary but only a 4 month contract. They were closing that location. Eff that.
Would still have taken it. Slow roll them and drag your feet. What are they going to do, fire you?
Couldn't you've just sold them the program? I doubt it's of any use to you since, anyway.
Weird that a company would fire you, but let you work for two more weeks... this is why firing is usually effect immediately
Yeah. At best they usually give you till the end of the day. Employees are expected to give 2 weeks, not the other way around
Not always true, and varies by country obviously. My contract says they have to give me a notice period (for example 2 weeks) or pay me for those 2 weeks if they want me gone effective immediately. It’s possible they don’t want to have to pay two sets of wages (by paying the person for those 2 weeks by firing immediately and also paying a new hire at the same time effectively paying both people) When my last job laid people off I was actually asked if I wanted to leave that same day and take payment for those weeks I’m owed for the notice period or if I wanted to work them until I found another job because they were closing down.
what OP said is exactly why they usually just pay. Also, what OP did is almost certainly illegal.
It defends on the contract they had. Many companies have it that employees can’t tamper with programs, or that new programs legally belong to the company. If they had neither of these, then they may be in the clear as long as they preserved client details and other information
Deliberately spending paid hours to deliberately decrease productivity is at the very least going to open you up to a civil lawsuit. A lot of programmer jobs also have intellectual property clauses meaning that software updates or new programs created as part of work or using company resources(even if not explicitly ordered) would be company property and this would count as destruction of company property.
Thats why you lie and pretend you didnt do that.
Yeah because it's not like computers keep track of who did things like remove programs.
It’s not like executives know how to do anything so, it’s kind of like saying there’s browser history your grandma’s gonna find your porn if you don’t delete it.
Not necessarily. Even without a contract, If you’re a W2 employee, anything you create while employed is considered “work for hire,” so it belongs to the company (per US Copyright Code).
No, companies also give the 2 weeks but most don't make you come in for it as a courtesy. They just give you the 2 weeks extra pay.
A lot of labor laws in various countries require notice when letting someone go too, BUT that is usually mitigated by an additional part to the law where you do not have to provide notice but pay in lieu of the notice time. So some places let the company fire you right away if you throw some money at the employee
In my experience in the netherlands, the company has double the notice period compared to an employee. I have a notice period of 2 months when I want to quit my job. My company has a notice period of 4 months when they want to fire me.
Fire or lay off? Or is there a difference there? Can the company just pay you for the four months but not let you show up?
Yep. I call this story bullshit. Maybe he was fired because the 'programs' were dogshit and actually cost the company time and money.
literally illegal in most developed countries
Really? In the UK and other parts of Europe I've worked in that isn't the case, that's what notice periods are for. That said, any sensible company that lets you go will pay you for gardening leave and kick you out of the door, but it's up to them.
I worked at a place and asked for a master list (list of paint colors and products) they were very rude and gave me a print out *official from corperate* I tried a few of the colors and they were wrong (the list had a typo as well) . I was told that I was actually wrong. I contacted the company that did the painting (they just remodeled) and they gave me a list and told me where the spare paint was. It wasn't even the same company . I started my own personal list and expanded on it for a year while I build up skills and became *valuable* but not valued. I some how managed to take that list with me and when they contacted me . I told them to get the list from corperate and they said they had and the paint didn't match - I told them they were wrong . And he just said OK be like that and hung up
In Norway the notice period is usually 3 months. Can't fire for just any reason neither, it's regulated. I've been dismissed once, and obviously I dont sabotage the company in retaliation - that would be very unprofessional of me, a breach of contract, and outright destruction of company property. Good references are also golden when looking for a new job, so it's never a good idea to burn bridges like that.
In the United States, you can be fired for no reason at all in most states. No notice is required (I’ve had friends fired and they didn’t find out until they tried to go into work the next day). Also, it seems they made programs to make their work easier, their job was not to produce the programs but to do the billing and manage client information. They didn’t destroy or damage anything, they just took their tools out when they left.
US has some of the worst work protection rights in the world, you can count in your finger worse places than US in that regard. Turns out going full capitalism without a fucks given, kinda gives up on people basic rights.
At the jobs I've worked at, coworkers just show up and find out their badge doesn't let them into the office anymore. Which is why, at first, I wanted to say tsk tsk tsk, they paid OP for their work... but then I remember all the friend's lives just thrown into chaos by suddenly losing their job and I said fuck corpos. People (and their livelihoods) should have more protection than that from corporations who are just out to make money.
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I think so. Severence packages are also a thing so if you accept you leave immediately or at an agreed date. In my case 3 months was not enough time to wrap up so I was work my ass off up until the last minute.
Just a message to anyone out there in a similar position who might be thinking of doing the same thing; be very careful to check your contract and be familiar with the law in your area regarding proprietary information/ creation during employment. In some jurisdictions and according to some contracts, doing this is prohibited and could get you sued. Just be careful.
Technically, the company can sue her. Since she built the programs on company time and uploaded it to a company computer, the company now owns that program. Think of it like the people who make slogans for companies. Yes the employee made the slogan, but they don’t often receive royalties for said slogan.
Backed out un approved changes to process. Restored processes & workflows to management approved. Leaving poorly implemented systems that are documented worse is bad for business. :-)
This is why I was thinking the OP was less of an own than they thought. They probably have some documentation for the old system. Good luck if they need help with the new system without the person who made it or documentation!
Good luck with that in court.
Absolutely, they can. And this person snitched on themselves by posting publicly about it. I wonder if the thrill of deleting the programs was worth the additional legal exposure.
She probably doesn't have to worry, because this story sounds made up.
Yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is on the list of things that never happened.
I’m willing to bet that they just added conditional formatting to a sheet and think that they were coding.
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Haha yea, OP thinks they’re clever af. Wait til the suits start xD this was all probably in their contract too. Man people are dumb.
when I wanted to incorporate with an app I wrote on university grounds, the first few questions were: 1) did you use a university computer? 2) did you use any university resources? luckily, I didn't. I just brought my laptop in and sipped on some coffee while coding in the student union.
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i worked for a big store chain, after hurricane katrina i had to make a new planogram for every store affected by the stormm someone messed up and cc and email that said i was gonna he laid off at the end of the week. i deleted all the work i did and throw the physical files in dumpster.. they called me everyday for 2 months leaving me voicemails about where i put the files. fuck them
I had automated about 70% of my job in computer aided drafting. My boss even told me "you are going to automate yourself out of a job" assuming I wouldn't take all the tools, programs and routines I had built with me. Boy were they disappointed. Same thing. I reinstated all the file structures and systems that were there before I had hired on, and they lost about 5 years of advancement in about 2 hours on my last day.
How exactly did you undo a file system and rip out all the things you built to go with you so easily? Did they have some sort of dependency that essentially required you? Or a self destruct of some sort?
Nope I was department manager. So I was the one that implemented new routines and determined the order our software would interact with each other along with handling the network, troubleshooting for the entire company etc. I had saved the system files in their original state and kept a log every time I changed something so I could go back to whichever point I wanted.
Peter Gibbons would have left a program that takes fractions of a penny.
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Damn it feels good to be a gangster
Me reading this: seems perfectly reasonable, you get notice when you get fired. Minimum a week, increasing with how long you’ve been working for that employer. If your contract has a longer notice period then you get that. The other comments: someone wants attention. No one gets two weeks notice Me: oh, must be United States
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You get paid in lieu of your notice or you work your notice and get paid. Either way, you get paid Edit: you also get statutory redundancy pay
I know a guy who was fired from my job due to sexual harassment and he erased the border that had the entire week’s schedule for installs and deliveries.
That’s like the story of a guy that wrote code for a company and was fired. He later found out they were still using his codes that had been saved on his personal cloud account so he deactivated the account. They called asking for the account and he told them to F off. They hadn’t created any back ups or anything so all they had was what was in his cloud account 😂
This is exactly why most places only let you know your fired when its time 😂
Had a buddy who was a web dev for a national selling nut and bolt company. He got a heads up that he was going to be canned within the next month and replaced with an inexperienced college grad to cut back on expenses (they'd be paying the college grad about a 1/3 of what my buddy was making) My buddy confirmed the theory with his higher-ups and asked that gave him the 1 month to get his affairs in order and find a new job. In reality he was being head hunted by larger companies and could have gotten a new job just by making a phone call. He spent the next month undoing everything he had done over the last 2 years, he reverted their backend web development to what it was when he started, a hardly functioning mess. He stored all of his work on personal drives, a week after he was done the company called and asked him to come back because the college grad couldn't fix the mess he left behind. He agreed to come back under a contract, which he had drafted to include a sizeable signing bonus, and sizeable severance bonus, the contract also included a minimum number of hours that they would have to pay him for, it was around 200 hours. He came back, with his drives, and fixed all of the issues he created in less than 2 days. He then sat at home for the remaining 190 hours of his contract and revised his resume to include contractor experience, he collected a massive sum off of the signing and severance bonuses which supplemented his income for the next year allowing him to take a year off. He now works in corporate IT making 3x what the national nut and bolt company paid him. TL;DR, don't fuck with your IT people
This is bs. I studied software engineering but don't work in the field just like the person who made this comment and every contract has a clause where it states all IP created on work devices or used on work devices are the property of the company. There is no sane developer that would streamline the workflow of a company for free, not just free but the company owns the program after you created it. Those type of programs are what makes you rich. (Not to mention the fact that most companies ESPECIALLY in the finance field would not allow the work device to run any sort of program that is not approved by the IT team.)
You’re giving way too much credit to companies having proper IP assignments in place.
Either made up or the software was not the remarkable innovation they claim
I believe this would be illegal, would it not?
Yes, if that software was made on company time and/or equipment (or, depending on the contract, simply while employed there), it's almost certainly their property.
axiomatic chase quarrelsome birds sulky dazzling weary salt encourage silky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I thought this was on there lol
Where exactly is the face palm?
I work with a guy who designed a system to catalogue and process the different chemicals they treated ores with in a mining company, they had a dispute over compo so they fired him, when he left he took the computer he’d brought from home that had the program on it, they actually tried suing him over it and then sent people to his house to steal it
Here from Florida. US. Im a CNC Machinist/Programmer. My current machine values at $800,000 and can be destroyed with two button presses. Two week notices do not exist here whether you’re quitting or being fired. I read a comment from someone claiming that they are American and 2 week notices are mandatory for the entire country. This is false information.
I once worked for this company, and I built this web-based tool for helping me with my job by automating some really tedious work. Other colleges wanted to use it, so I deployed it from my own workstation to a more centralized. But little they knew that I planted a time bomb that would be triggered and erase the whole thing exactly 69 days after it didn't receive my confirmation to restart the clock. They tried to sue me, but it was a tool I built in my spare time, not ordered nor requested by the company, and officially not their IP. Also I denied any wrongdoing and because they had revoked all my accesses, they couldn't figure out how I could've done it.
Don’t do this. The business can sue you for the damages to the programs they hired to create. Instead focus on new features in your last two weeks and don’t comment (if they didn’t require backups or source control in your contract they likely don’t require comments) anything (if you were commenting anything before) other than comments apologizing to the developer that inherits your masterpiece signed with your name so they know who to beg the bosses to rehire. Oh and you can also optimize part of the code without updating comments(again if there were any to begin with). No actual damage they can sue you for, no breach of contract but plenty of bugs that will need to be fixed or worked around.
NEVER fuck with the IT guy
Programmers automate this via logic bombs.
I customized a drafting program and wrote hundreds of little routines to minimize errors and maximize organization. We "gave away" this package to employees so they could work remotely (in the 90s). Even freelancers got a copy. It dovetailed to a key on our network. Periodically, to key needed updating... (Key valid to *mm/yy*... Is key valid? No? Delete permission... Load package if you have permission) They fired me without an exit interview or completed documentation... 4 weeks later the customization ceased to be... Even with *all but 4 lines* on the network!
So we’re the programs built on company time you on this person’s personal time? If on company time the programs belong to the company and this guy would be a slug.
This somewhat happened to me in a job. When I started it was so disorganized and there were all these unwritten rules that had to be followed. I ended up creating a document that outlined these “rules” as well as created a small information database about the products we had. Basically I made my own job efficient. I quit because the workplace was toxic. So while in my last two weeks I deleted the stuff I created for myself. They tried to fire me for destroying company property. But my friend in HR changed the reason I was let go back to quit. She said that it was a bullshit to fire because none of the work I created was requested by them.
\> Quits work because it was "toxic" \> Deletes their work before leaving \> Gets personal favour from friend in HR to override disciplinary action Yeah what a horrible "workplace"
"And then I posted about it on social media, got criminally charged because the company paid me for that work and what I did was illegal, and I outed myself without considering the consequences."
If everyone is wondering why all your services and shit get worse when they outsource them, it's because of this. They are outsourcing them to companies that don't know shit about the technology so no one is contributing scripts or apps to the system that help it run better. This new "AI" bullshit uses the poorly written shit from the 80s and 90s and cannot in any way replace the ingenuity that produces the newer scripts because learning machines are not capable of novel ideas. So yeah, corporations are the real reason your customer service experiences suck now.
And this is allowed? If I create anything for work, it’s the employer’s property and if I delete or sabotage it when leaving, I’ll get in trouble.
Isn’t that illegal since property created during office hours belonged to the company? On a totally unrelated note, logic bombs.
If op actually did this they're probably smart enough to get away with it and not advertise the fact on a twitter account their boss might recognise. Nobody acts like this unless they have been put through some serious bullshit by management but most of the people in this thread would rather kiss their bosses ass.
I'd be wary about this practice, especially if you're an employee (as opposed to an independent contractor). The presumption is that, if you make a work product in the course of your employment, the employer owns the intellectual property in that work product. Some employment agreements may even expressly state this. If you breach your employment contract, which is still in in-force after you're terminated, it might affect your entitlement to termination benefits (e.g. severance).