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Admin
It definitely was a gift to their legal department.
Admin
I've seen a few Edger-style engineers. One of them was my team leader for a few months. Working with them wasn't the most comfortable experience in my life, but my (and their) management was wise enough to get along with them, to our mutual benefit.
Also, it was quite kind of Edgar to not shut the whole thing down one frosty morning, leaving them this mosquito bite instead.
Admin
P.S. In my own clash with an Edgar -- the only in my life -- I found and exploited a genuine technical weakness of his. He couldn't bear it and left the company.
Admin
Perhaps when an employee goes of his own accord, or especially if he is fired, in a situation of disputes with management and co-workers, an audit of the codebase should be an automatic activity in the aftermath.
Discuss.
Admin
Where I am from, such gifts are a common and approved practice... when you submit a code sample for your interview or probation. This way if you are let go without pay, but the code is used later without your permission, there's be a penalti clause. If your code isn't used, that's obviously not an issue, and if you're paid, you must quietly defuse the payload, as if it never existed.
Admin
Expensive and impractical.
Admin
Leaving sabotaged scripts is totally unacceptable. However, it is generally the Edgars of this world who do the best work, are the ones who prevent the whole place falling apart and end up leaving when clueless management introduce changes which sound fashionable but are actually pointless. In real life, rather than stories like this, Edgars move to another company and turn it into a success and the company who drove him away collapses as the new processes fail miserably and the lack of Edgar's expertise proves fatal.
Sadly, I've never had anywhere near the skills and expertise of an Edgar, but I'm aware that the importance of such people is grossly underestimated.
Admin
One of my first programming jobs was assisting our family business's programmer. He told me about doing consulting work and deliberately leaving bugs in the code, so that the customer would hire him later to fix them. He could get away with this because the customers didn't have their own software developers who could review his work (it was the 70's, there weren't as many software engineers then).
Admin
...and you all know, of course, what a Gift is in German or Danish...
Admin
Menacing or otherwise, what is "100% test coverage?" (And yes, I've been a test engineer under MISRA-C. Don't give me any of this duck typed Python nonsense.)
Admin
One company I worked at had layoffs. We knew about it, but not exactly when. One poor colleague had been hired precisely two years before the layoffs, and all cards always stopped working automatically and had to be replaced after two years. Poor guy thought he had lost his job.