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I feel like many HN'ers have been in this situation. I was once in a confedential "back out" of a system. There was some shared code base with the other compa

I feel like many HN'ers have been in this situation. I was once in a confedential "back out" of a system. There was some shared code base with the other company. One of our devs made a comment that was something like "Reversing Migration Script" in the code. In less than an hour from that commit(I didn't know at the time) I was in stuck in a firestorm WTF DID YOU DO battle between the two CEO's of the companies. It turns out that the other company was ACTIVELY spying for such terms in the code so they could react if we tried to leave. It was going to be an honest non renewal at the end of the contract so not even anything shady. I didn't find out till later about how they were spying out so there was this huge witch hunt about who was the rat and such. It was awful. It seems this level of sociopathy is just the norm these days and I'm just an old fuddy duddy doing regular honest work without having a Machiavellian scheme running in parallel no wonder places only want to hire 20yo's /s /sorta.

bombcar 1y ago
Anything that might be monitored should have EVERYTHING named variables that trigger the monitoring. Like the old NSA copypasta.
- fragmede 1y ago
  So my one-letter variable names are a form of defensive programming?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    They are, but I’m saying go to the other extreme, where every variable triggers their sensors and floods them with useless data until they give up monitoring.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      int *nsa_spy_data_buffer
esafak 1y ago
How were they spying? Help people learn from this incident.
- gtirloni 1y ago
  > There was some shared code base with the other company. One of our devs made a comment that was something like "Reversing Migration Script" in the code.
  - ayende 1y ago
    That isn't spying. That is called doing code review on a shared depenendcy
    - citizenpaul 1y ago
      Do you normally report your code reviews to the CEO in minutes of getting them? Didn't think so. Think what you like though. This company normally took weeks to respond for any other code related issue. I would describe them as passive aggressively slow. Maybe they really did review everything spot on and just deliberately slow rolled approval to "manage expectations" on the day to day.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  I'm not really sure. As a said in another comment. They normally took weeks to respond to code/tech issues. For some reason this random code edit was run up to the CEO within minutes of it being made. The CI/CD was on github actions. IDK if there is a standard spy tool there.

bombcar 1y ago

Anything that might be monitored should have EVERYTHING named variables that trigger the monitoring. Like the old NSA copypasta.

fragmede 1y ago
So my one-letter variable names are a form of defensive programming?
- bombcar 1y ago
  They are, but I’m saying go to the other extreme, where every variable triggers their sensors and floods them with useless data until they give up monitoring.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    int *nsa_spy_data_buffer

esafak 1y ago

How were they spying? Help people learn from this incident.

gtirloni 1y ago
> There was some shared code base with the other company. One of our devs made a comment that was something like "Reversing Migration Script" in the code.
- ayende 1y ago
  That isn't spying. That is called doing code review on a shared depenendcy
  - citizenpaul 1y ago
    Do you normally report your code reviews to the CEO in minutes of getting them? Didn't think so. Think what you like though. This company normally took weeks to respond for any other code related issue. I would describe them as passive aggressively slow. Maybe they really did review everything spot on and just deliberately slow rolled approval to "manage expectations" on the day to day.
citizenpaul 1y ago
I'm not really sure. As a said in another comment. They normally took weeks to respond to code/tech issues. For some reason this random code edit was run up to the CEO within minutes of it being made. The CI/CD was on github actions. IDK if there is a standard spy tool there.