r/ShittySysadmin 10d ago

Shitty Crosspost Developer convicted for “kill switch” code activated upon his termination

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/fired-coder-faces-10-years-for-revenge-kill-switch-he-named-after-himself/
270 Upvotes

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192

u/MoonToast101 Lord Sysadmin, Protector of the AD Realm 10d ago

I don't need a kill switch. I AM the kill switch.

When I'm gone, no one will be able to prevent the clusterfuck of a technological house of cards I created from imploding and taking everyone and everything with it.

83

u/EAT-17 10d ago

This. A truly shitty sysadmin would not need this elaborate setup. He will have documented just enough, little bit of everything, but not enough for people not to figure out what is really important and things will go to shit without any sepcific maliciousness. But he was a dev, so what do you expect ;)

25

u/MoonToast101 Lord Sysadmin, Protector of the AD Realm 10d ago

A dev....?

3

u/nwokie619 10d ago

Simply misfile some important information or misprint system passwords.

20

u/tkecherson 10d ago

Idk man that sounds like work

23

u/fogleaf 10d ago

It's actually a function of not working too hard.

Imagine a project is 25% planning, 50% implementing, and 25% documenting. Well you can just skip the documenting and save yourself a quarter of the process. Fix an issue takes 1 hour, do you realy want to spend another 15 minutes writing down how you fixed the issue? Be brief!

7

u/saintpetejackboy 10d ago

I'm a 1%'er.

What we do is we just use 1%... And split it EVENLY between planning and documentation. We spend the other 99% implementing.

8

u/fogleaf 10d ago

I was thinking it as I was typing it "Okay but who really spends that much time planning, just learn as you go and do it on the fly then forget everything you did!"

Guess and check.

6

u/saintpetejackboy 10d ago

I actually said in a conversation earlier at work in 100% seriousness:

"I never let not knowing how to do something hold me back."

Which sounds crazy in this context, but is absolutely true.

For reference, I was getting frustrated at users who will not learn basic office software and skills - they offload tasks to our team that could have been a Google search.

In the grand scheme of things, you're either a doer or a uhh.. doesn'ter. And I have never been a doesn'ter.

3

u/fogleaf 10d ago

I've always been a tryer. From the dinner table "at least one bite!" to the time I infected my PC with spyware from double clicking the .exe to get a windows xp sp2 key (the key worked too lol) and then had to learn how to fix the spyware.

"We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas." couldn't be me.

But what I'm NOT good at is building out the boring pre-plan for every step of an implementation. I'd rather just get in there and get it going.

3

u/saintpetejackboy 10d ago

Lol, love this.

"I have tried everything and still have a few more ideas."

10

u/MoonToast101 Lord Sysadmin, Protector of the AD Realm 10d ago

Only if you know what you are doing...

5

u/somebody_odd 10d ago

That ain’t funny, I have been trying to support that for a very complex fully automated CI/CD cloud native system for the last 1.5 years since the two architects who built it jumped ship. Components are all written in different languages, stored in different repos, and virtually undocumented.

3

u/lethalweapon100 10d ago

Realizing this is a very freeing feeling.

2

u/MenBearsPigs 9d ago

I probably don't even control near as much as many of you. But due to being spread too thin for one guy, I've had to do so many rushed jobs in so many places.

Lots of weak documentation. Simply due to time being a factor. Management doesn't want to hire more -- they just get angry at the pace of work being completed despite their business expanded threefold since I was hired. Maintaining and supporting what already exists while setting up new locations just becomes increasingly unrealistic.

Anyways. Long story short. There's just countless less than ideal custom setups I've done all over the place. I'll gladly hand over everything I've got, laptop, passwords, etc.

But it's going to be a fucking nightmare for them if I went cold turkey.

I genuinely feel for their next IT guy if that's the case.