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.

Yes. Exactly. They'll also deploy upgrades to themselves painlessly. Thankfully that's never been a huge ongoing pain felt by everyone paying attention.

(I couldn't resisit adding a "yes, and" to your point.

Edit: And the AI agents will back themselves up correctly, too! We trained them on the activities of all currently living IT engineers, and the average of our work always results in a successful backup...

If that wasn't true, we would be having a new ransomware crisis every month...

I'm sure glad we live in one of the good timelines, and have plenty of clean correct code and configuration data to train our AI on!

(This is, of course, sarcasm. Companies that shift to AI IT agents today can expect to very quickly reach today's median IT outcome. There's not enough popcorn in the world for what is coming.)

Which solution will each party embrace, and how will they accomplish their objectives?

Both American parties Each party will solve it the way they have solved climate change.

but they were hoping for a lot more of an exodus. Particularly in the L6/7 level.

Higher is more senior right? Counting up from L1?

If so, that's an insane amount of ego, to want less of that talent. Wow.

But I bet the drugs they do are amazing, though.

Out of all the jobs, the bosses job is the most replaceable

unemployed = more free time to organize!

I get the feeling that simply working at Amazon means your job is at risk.

That's pretty much how it goes yeah lol

Yet they will never be replaced, sadly.

They get all of the credit and none of the blame.

It’s a bit misleading for engineering.

Every Engineer starts at L4. That’s the junior position.

L5 is the mid-senior level. Most SDEs in Amazon are L5 and that’s considered a terminal position. For management this is the “junior” (for lack of a better term) tier

L6 is Senior but it’s closer to staff engineers at other companies. You tend to do more cross team work. This is also where a glut of managers are at

L7 is Principal engineer and senior manager. Only about 2% of engineers get here. Managers at this lever oversee multiple teams.

L8+ is fancy external hires and directors.

The problem is that Amazon expects a lot of people to churn out before you hit the L6/7 levels. They dangle a carrot of super high pay for those tiers but don’t actually expect to pay it long term. There’s quite a few that have stayed longer than expected. And it’s hard to get out because they know how to game the system to demonstrate “impact”. Now that isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of good managers and engineers at this tier either. There are really good people at this tier. It’s just Amazon doesn’t want that many at this tier for long.

Also if the idea of having an expected churn and dangling pay that no one can hit sounds dystopian and awful it is. Amazon sucks.

Time to head for greener pastures.