[Unosolo]

The original Vanity Fair article tries very hard to paint a picture of a stereotypical overly naive techy.

Little carefully inserted details such as pain-the-back side of having to mow the lawn, all these details should be creating a picture of life-unsavvy coding reclude in reader's mind. The reader supposed to chuckle "how naive, anyone who is on $270K can just hire gardener to take care of the lawn!"

I have personal knowledge of programmers taking the code with them when leaving employment for no particular reason except for "in case I might need it as a reference" and then never ever looking at it again. In my mind it's very much akin to hoarding.

I have very little doubt that the code would be unusable outside of GC infrastructure.

What does seem unusually harsh is the punishment for the crime when no damage was ever done to the victim; to me this is an attribute of a show-case trial.