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I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally. Added r
by brightball 3y ago
I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally.
Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird.
EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
- snoopsnopp 3y agoI don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.
- brightball 3y agoIt was an internal tool and the VP was the head of IT. Everything still worked, it was just painful to use. He could have pulled the plug on it at any time.
- epolanski 3y agoI don't think any of those details matter, that's still illegal and you could've gotten in trouble legally.
- CamperBob2 3y agoI'm curious; what law was being broken, exactly?
- epolanski 3y agoBreaking fiduciary duty would be the first that comes to my mind. Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.
- systemvoltage 3y agoCEO can say it is his fiduciary duty to phase out old software and put a brand spanking new modern enterprise grade system. Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders need to sue him to matter at all.
- ikiris 3y agoWhere do you think fiduciary duty exists as a random software dev?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoFiduciary duty is a particular legal concept about the responsibility one party has to another, and only applies in specific, defined circumstances. A random developer doesn't have a fiduciary duty to anyone, and he wasn't taking any risk.
- sgentle 3y agoSibling commenters: for what it's worth, the notion of an employee having a fiduciary duty to their employer isn't as crazy as it sounds. eg, see here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1-4514-9e30-3749303c7c26 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1... That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. If they weren't acting to their employer's benefit, then whose? Employee fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like embezzling or competing with your own company while you're still working there. An example of Fox getting shut down for trying to claim that sexual harassment was a breach of fiduciary duty: https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-the-scope-of-an-employees-fiduciary-duty/ https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-the-sc...
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThanks for the correction, TIL.
- epolanski 3y ago> That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. There has to be proof about that. If everything was verbal how do you prove it? There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your company is illegal and a breach of contract.
- hamandcheese 3y agoWhat law was broken?
- throwaway5959 3y agoI don’t see how it’s any different than Windows ME.
- ajcp 3y agomorality <> legality
- burnte 3y agoWhat laws do you think making a bad tool violates?
- gosub100 3y agobut you can't seem to name which crime.
- bobnamob 3y agoThe operative word is “internal” in OPs post. Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to drive migration
- fbdab103 3y agoEven if it were an external tool, I fail to understand how there would be a legal problem. Companies use all sorts of shenanigans to encourage users to migrate. Immoral? Sure, but software crossed that bridge a long time ago. Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft tricked them into upgrading Windows.
- ulchar 3y agothis one's crazy lol. frankly it sounds kind of fun, but i'm sure it was not in reality.
- brightball 3y agoIt was actually pretty entertaining. This was almost 20 years ago.
- cutemonster 3y agoDid you meet the coworkers who were complaining at the coffee brewer or sth like that, and overheard anything they said about it? If so, must have been an odd feeling, and hard to not smile and say something
- brightball 3y agoNot that I remember. It was a company with about 2,000 employees and I generally stayed on the IT floor.
- drpixie 3y agoDifferent but similar. I once wrote a trivial lotto number selector app, at the request of some colleagues. It just emitted a few unique random numbers. Silly but why not. They hated it. I added moderate, random delays before emitting each number. They loved it, and used it every week for quite some time :)
- bombcar 3y agoReminds me of all the rules you have to apply to a random music player to make it feel random.
- siikanen 3y agoWhat rules you have to add?
- yhager 3y agoThat's not a useless project! It's a silly piece of code, but it gave joy to people, so I would say much more useful than most stories in this thread. Back in the nineties my dad had the notion that if you make the computer select numbers at random many times, and you run statistics on the results you gain some "legitimacy" to these selections. So he asked me to write a "lotto number selector program", but it needed to run for a few hours and select many numbers and then output the ones that were selected the most or some such. Maybe it was more sophisticated, but I can't really remember the details. I guess I could just add a delay instead of actually selecting the numbers, but I wouldn't lie to my dad :) It was super silly, but like you said, why not, I was a teen/tween and I didn't mind playing around with silly software. He actually used it and actually filled out the lotto numbers based on it. No, we never won the millions :) Also - I just visited a casino in Spokane, WA for the first time ever. Isn't that what all the machines there are doing? A random number emitter thingy with random delays, animation, music and flashing lights?
- asdfman123 3y agoRarely are people ever that honest to you in a corporate environment. Usually you have to spend years working away and trying to guess why everything you're told to do makes the software worse.
- rgmerk 3y agoThere may have been very good reasons to sunset the internal tool, and underhanded as this was it may have made a necessary process a lot less painful that it might otherwise have been.
- dkarl 3y agoWe had an internal tool that was written as a quick hack by a rogue developer but then became crucial for our operations. It was starting to show some rough edges and some performance limitations, so a big project was planned to replace it, run by two fancy new hires who demanded teams of underling developers and ridiculously inflated titles before they would tackle the project. It quickly became clear that this project would not bear fruit anytime soon, so my boss asked me on the down-low to produce an unofficial stopgap replacement for the parts of the old system that weren't scaling well. However, it could never threaten to be a full replacement, because then I'd be stepping on the toes of our expensive diva hires. Long story short, last time I heard, both the original hack and my partial replacement were still in use ten years after I left. The big project ran for almost two years without replicating a single feature of the original hack. Right up to the last, the fancy guys produced an impressive series of complaints and excuses that basically said that they were doing everything right but doing things right didn't work because the problem and the context were wrong.
- itsoktocry 3y agoI don't understand why anybody would commit to work that explicitly and deliberately makes other people's lives miserable. Where do you draw the line?
- brightball 3y agoIt was my first job. In that position I pretty much did whatever I was asked without questioning it. Did a lot of great work with good people there too. Projects that lasted for nearly a decade.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoIsnt this fraud or something? At least this person caused damages. Sounds like they should be reported.