It's not a stupid question. From what I hear, people try stuff like this all the time, stuff like putting a bit of code on your employer's system that'll erase important files if you get shit canned and no longer appear on the payroll. It's why a lot of companies no longer give notice when ppl are fired, just have security walk them out. And unfortunately this stuff is often traceable, which means they're risking quite serious prosecution.

I don't like much of what I see, I think it's becoming clear that some new tech is going to have wide ranging and harmful effects. I'm not sure that doing luddite stuff will help but I can understand why people would think that way.

It's abuser tactics - "You're lucky you've got me, no-one else would have you, now take more shit." It's cheaper than making employees feel happy and valued. And yeah, some very successful companies absolutely see their employees as disposable. I'm hoping this'll become a problem for them when they've burned through the available pool of vulnerable staff, but we don't seem to be there yet.

We could just regulate tech companies and outright ban some practices but since we apparently don't have time for rational solutions...

Well thought out sabotage can be written off to causality or involuntary human error.

Not giving notice of lay off is an abusive work practice and only shows how far we've allowed work conditions to degrade.

And that practice itself can be highly dangerous, if we consider a person can be midway into a complex task that can turn extremely difficult to follow by another: waste of time, resources, energy and money.

yes, create a legion of angry, unemployed/unemployable people, that will go well for the capitalist system

But why? Why make them scared they'll lose their jobs

Overly bossy bosses often believe that people work more, or perform better this way.

Amazon is currently hemorrhaging executive level and above engineers. Amazon will have to be replacing these jobs with AI cause every one of value has already left/is leaving and filling those jobs with qualified people at that level is actually a lot more difficult than more junior level positions.

They’re actually significantly below their current hiring target at the executive level and people are leaving left and right.

Nah, not stupid. But yeah it's hard to do without leaving a very clear trail. I assume most engineers want to keep their job and their income.

But programmers tend to use some form of a "versioning" system like git. This will record everyone's changes to the codebase, when a change was made, what was changed, who changed it. And it allows you to go back and revert changes if something important broke. Very convenient for programmers, less convenient for sabotage.

That’s Amazon and many other big tech company cultures. Hostile hustle culture. You could always lose your job as you need to be a “top performer” to stay. They purposely let the “lowest performers” go on a regular basis.

This is going to be the threat that EVERY employee will hear over the next several years, whenever they ask for any sort of a raise, promotion, etc. "Just be glad we don't replace you with AI."

And if all that were to happen. You just caused eventual iron man uprising due to lack of supervision on code updates.

How kind of him to tell his staff to look elsewhere for jobs so far in advance. Polish that resume team!

When I was last there a while ago people were leaving but they were hoping for a lot more of an exodus. Particularly in the L6/7 level.

Has that changed?

Don’t worry, they’ve got the army + police at their feet to keep people in line!

unless the public are well organized

if you don't boycott Amazon by now it's time to start. Don't buy from them don't work for them. Let them rot in the dark.

Yes, a few times before I have thought, “what possible good can come from this?” In response to utterances by petty, nervous tyrannical managers.

Quick recap for future historians:

• for a really brief part of its history, humanity tried to give kindness a go. A half-hearted attempt at best, but there were things like DEI programs, for instance, attempting to create a gentler, more accepting world for everyone. At the very least, trying to appear human to the people they managed was seen as a good attribute for Leaders.

• some people felt that their God-given right to be assholes to everyone was being taken away (it's right there in the Bible: be a jerk to your neighbor, take away his job and f##k his wife)

• Assholes came back in full force, with a vengeance. Not that they had ever disappeared, but now they relished the opportunity to be openly mean for no reason again. Once again, True Leaders were judged by their ability to drain every drop of blood from their employees and take their still-beating hearts as an offering to the Almighty Shareholders.

Developer guilty of using kill switch to sabotage employer's systems

A software developer has been found guilty of sabotaging his ex-employer's systems by running custom malware and installing a

BleepingComputer (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

10 years in jail is what's stopping them.

It's REALLY hard to create a dead man's switch that works, but also leaves no trace. Even if you delete the script after it executes, there's probably backups or logs that show what happened.

Stupid question but what is stopping the software engineers to poison the well?

Great question. I agree with other responses - it happens, and there's motive to hush it up, so we tend not to hear about it.

It's also just really hard to tell the difference after the fact between "Dave sabotaged us" and "no one knows how to do what Dave did".

But I'll add - there's currently little need motive sabotage AI implementations. Current generation AI is largely unable to deliver on what is promised, in a business sense. It does cool but useless things, like quickly generating low maturity code, and writing a summary any seven year old could have wtitten.

Current generation AI adds very little business value, while creating substantial risks. Nevermind that no one knows how Dave worked, now no one knows how our AI works, and it's so eager to please everyone that it lies at critical moments.

Companies playing around with current generation AI to boost next quarter's stocks will hit plenty of "find out" soon enough, with nothing beyond the natural consequences of ignoring their own engineers advice.

All that to say - if we see what looks like sabotage, it may well just be the natural consequences of stupidity.