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I worked with a guy who seemingly intentionally engineered his “bus factor” down to one. He worked on a giant inscrutable shell script that was used in all our

by pram 3y ago

I worked with a guy who seemingly intentionally engineered his “bus factor” down to one. He worked on a giant inscrutable shell script that was used in all our provisioning, and it was kept solely on his laptop in RCS (https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/ https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/) So obviously, additions or changes all had to go through him. I’ve never seen such aggressive gatekeeping before or since. I’m still a little impressed!

corethree 3y ago
It's a subtle art that doesn't get as much attention as it should. Instead everybody is into design patterns and functional programming and all that garbage. Fortunately masters in this art have codified it's techniques in this classic tome: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- em-bee 3y ago
  keeping a system critical tool on an employee laptop is not subtle, it's outright hostile. someone refusing to fix that when asked would instantly be on the "fire at next opportunity" list.
  - corethree 3y ago
    But he wasn't and that is a masterful display of true skill in the art.
    - corethree 3y ago
      The ultimate master would not only hoard code on his own laptop and still keep his job but he would make it seem like you're the crazy one when you speak out and get you fired.
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  > For pseudo-Esperanto pluraloj, add oj. You will be doing your part toward world peace. This is one of the greatest troll documents since the textfiles days. Outstanding!
cdchn 3y ago
Thats a blast from the past. In what year was he using RCS? If this was like the 90s this VCS was all the rage at about the same time "making yourself un-fire-able" was.