Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zeafoamrun 39 days ago
Heh, a place where I worked some guy who left kept committing code for months (he went to work for a company we were a vendor for). Some of my teammates knew and just thought it was no big deal, he was fixing bugs and adding features.

The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.

4 comments

Was his name … Milton?
"We fixed the glitch"
I have door codes and passwords for a major organisation that I last worked for somewhere in the region of 20 years ago. They haven't rotated a damn thing. I still know people who work there, and I guess technically I still support things for them in an informal question-over-a-pint kind of way, but damn me, put in some effort guys.
This story deserves a movie, or at least a long video essay!

Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.

You might enjoy this story then. 2 guys at apple continue to finish and ship their product after being laid off ..

https://www.pacifict.com/story/

IIRC 50 Shades had a case of "remember me, the woman you fired? I talked to your boss' boss and I'm your boss now"
so he was doing free labor for your company? What's he getting out of that?
he went to work for a company we were a vendor for

Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder.

I'd happily pay $$$$$$ to hire someone with commit access to Cloudflare, AWS or Google's codebase who could fix the goddamn bugs, let alone add new features.

> Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder.

This honestly sounds like the sort of thing I'd sit down with the employee, their new employer, and various "Compliance Team" members, and firm up a bit.

Sounds good for everyone.

We get our bugs fixed, $vendor gets to say "Well we have this thing that was developed in-house for BoshNet, that might solve your problem too, it's going to cost you <some comical amount>", and everyone's happy.

No company with a legal rep is going to be happy with that situation - ever.

Who even owns the code the person is working on? Who is responsible when it goes wrong?

Never happy is a bit of an exaggeration. SYSV UNIX had all of these risks and various legal departments went through them as they do regularly for more typical types of research.
When it was explicit, and part of the relationship, sure. Because those questions aren’t questions.
That’s the “firming up” bit. You have a contract that deems the code “work for hire” even though the money flow is wonky. Legally the guy is like any 1099.
> We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.
Just finished reading, love these kind of stories. Thanks for sharing