Thursday, August 20, 2015

Geek: evil code commit...

Geek: evil code commit ... to make before you leave your job.  This assumes, of course, that you're willing to burn a lot of bridges, with geekly napalm.

The closest thing I've ever seen to this was a “code bomb” that an angry employee committed about a week before he left.  This was at an electronic stock trading company, and the code bomb added a random number of shares to an order, intermittently (a few times a day).  So, for instance, a trader might place an order to sell 1,000 shares of IBM, and it would be turned into an order to sell (say) 1,400 shares instead.  Fortunately we caught this during testing, before the software ever got released to a real trader.  That one could have been bad.  We just fixed it and moved on; the company never took any action against the ex-employee.  I don't think we ever even told him that we'd found his bomb...

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