At my first professional full-time gig as a software engineer I had to find a way of dumping data from barcode scanners, after some software written in-house wa

At my first professional full-time gig as a software engineer I had to find a way of dumping data from barcode scanners, after some software written in-house was supposed to download all data, flush it to disk, then empty the scanners for re-use. Problem was that the flushing to disk part didn't work (but said it did) so all data was lost. This was for scanning attendees at conferences, so all data on attendees were seemingly lost. It wasn't me losing the data, and I don't blame the engineer that did, but management sure didn't mind doing that. I took the heat for it by standing up to them and saying "there's a bad news/good news situation here" and refocusing their attention. Bad news was obviously the data looked lost, the good news was it's probably not overwritten so I suggested we write a very small piece of firmware that just does a memory dump – the scanners didn't have separate slots for storage, firmware etc, it was all in one place – and hope the memory is ordered such that the firmware comes first, followed by all the attendee data. It worked – the firmware was indeed written first and dumping it all revealed all attendee data in raw form. Thankfully it was more or less all ascii so it wasn't difficult to process the dump after it'd been downloaded. We had to do this with 20+ scanners since the mistake wasn't discovered right away. I believe management later tried to resell this as a "data recovery solution" to other firms using these types of scanners – don't think they had much success though. The engineer who lost the data at first mostly got off the hook with some blame game and a warning. It wasn't a very good working environment, and prior to losing the data the engineer had been pushing serious overtime hours without so much as a thank you because management had promised delivery without involving engineering in the discussions. A few months later that engineer and several others, including myself, quit for other jobs.