[pydry]

I sometimes wonder what kind of state these people leave the code/docs/infra in.

Like, do they try to be conscientious about leaving the company in a good state? or do they leave deliberately misleading handover docs and release some subtly broken code before walking out the door...

[pavel_lishin]

If I were in this position, I would absolutely not sabotage anything. Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me & others. It also opens me up to litigation, or even criminal charges down the line!

But I'm also not exactly going to be excited to do a full brain data dump. At my current role, I try to document everything as well as I can; if I were in this situation, I certainly wouldn't go back through and make sure I didn't miss anything. You get what you get, and you don't get upset.

[pydry]

>Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me

Are you serious? Where's the hurt coming from?

I've been hired to take over a mess after people angrily quit more than once. The work I did took much longer than it would have if there had been a smooth hand over and there were tons of bugs and issues but the only people that were ever hurt by that were the shareholders and management with their deadlines and delivery schedules. I still got paid.

[pavel_lishin]

> Where's the hurt coming from?

From the stress and unhappiness of having to untangle a complicated mess. Yes, you still got paid, but wouldn't you rather have had a smoother flow of things?

[pydry]

I'd rather I didnt work for asshole union busters who would treat their employees like scum for a bit of extra profit.

If the company's site goes down because a guy who got fed up with that missed out step 3 on the deployment playbook I am just fine with that. It's not my site that went down and not my profit margin at risk.

[dclowd9901]

I’ve never in my 13 or so years in this industry seen even the most disgruntled person leave anything in an intentionally broken state. Broken due to incompetence though? Plenty.

[paradox460]

I got laid off while working to fix a nasty bug that kept crashing our servers. I never finished or checked in that code, and the corpus of discovery leading to the solution was all ephemeral on my machine, so when I wiped said machine, it went up in smoke.

I wasn't deliberately sabotaging anything, and had I been given more notice than a morning video meeting with the office manager before my access was cut, I'd have probably checked in at least my WIP with a good commit message. But I wasn't, so I didn't

[meepmorp]

Yeah, I've seen people get fired and it actually lessened the amount of work those around them had to do. There's people out there in big and small companies, doing negative work every day.

[datavirtue]

Code is useless without engineers. When the flight begins no one is going to do anything. Everyone checks out and spends their time fluffing their wings.

At GE the engineers know that engines don't fly without them (designs and specs are useless without engineers) so if they are in a position to do so they hold information close to their chest--tons of info are not in the design. They are very much dependent on a core group of engineers for each system. Just like any tech system, things are going sideways constantly for various reasons and they have to respond very quickly to customers and regulators. That response requires the tacit knowledge they hold in their head or under their desk. Not to mention the pet unicorn spaghetti code they develop to analyze sensor data which is crucial to projecting failure across fleets when one-offs are encountered.

Middle management has it's own game they play...it's wink and knod all the way down the chain...if they like you.

[ipaddr]

When this happens the chaos. First week everyone ignores you and 4 days left a panic around handover happens.

Leaving things in a good state doesn't really matter when they fire you unexpectedly why does it matter so much when you quit?

[re-thc]

There are often just no docs.

[Lacerda69]

Docs?? are you serious, you barely have docs with highly motivated people. best you can expect is nothing, worst is actively destructive behaviours