Dave works as a programmer in a small IT department within a large division of a gigantic company. Unlike his company’s Central IT, his division’s IT department doesn’t seem to hire regular programmers. Instead, they take people from within the division that have programming acclimations and stick them on the programming team. Combine this with the lack of a real development process, testing, or even user feedback, and a lot of interesting programs end up in production.

Instead of sharing a line of code to represent his department’s applications, Dave decided to send in the entire contents of a single file (“please.txt”) that was found amongst a number of other text files and executables within one application’s deployment folder...

As for what the file did or, more importantly, what the consequences of removing it might be, Dave has yet to figure that out. In his experience, it’s best to leave alone the please.txt’s of his department’s applications.

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