Dude I’ve been watching Family Guy lately and think about that every episode. I hadn’t seen most of the seasons before and I keep thinking that one of these days they need to address it. Are they going to address it??
Under capitalism they would be fired and the raccoons made to replace them for no pay.
No joke there are tons of stories of people writing programs to automate their job, management finding out, and basically getting fired while the company appropriates their automation code, since from their profit chasing perspective why should they pay someone if they can just take the code they wrote which will do the same thing for free?
Which is why you always implement a dead man’s switch that you can turn off if you leave the job amicably. And never leave your source code behind if you can avoid it.
Then they’ll get their lawyers involved to fuck you over. Since you probably coded it on company time with company equipment, they own everything and can sue you if you put booby traps in it. Hell there have been contracts in tech that say that everything you code while employed, regardless of whether it’s related to the business or not, they can claim, whether that extent is enforcible is another question but just the mere fact that plenty of companies are brazen enough to try that shit speaks for how much they expect to get away with, and they’re probably right.
Individuals rarely win against businesses as a design feature of capitalist society.
Well then at the very least do what I did: put in the code an Easter Egg that wishes you a happy birthday on your birthday in the copyright blurb at the bottom of the intranet page.
It is hard to get source code even from devs employed as devs in most of the world, getting source code from average office plankton is outright impossible.
The premise of this thread is someone writing code that automates them out of their own job. Even the most incompetent company is going to make sure they have that code before firing the author.
The dead man switch at one of my last places was the companies incompetence and lack of forethought.
When I left, I told them that the files for their system that I designed, built, and maintained was on the laptop I was returning to them.
They wiped it.
They also had zero clue how to use the programs I had nor any other aspect of that system so they really shot themselves in the foot then shot their other one to test of the first one hurt
Breaking news: confused and obsessive individual gets neutrally observing counterpart’s age, intelligence, living situation and attitude towards the subject matter wrong in desperate two weeks later supposed rejoinder which also happens to be missing at least one word.
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