Ask HN: What's the most damage you've seen one person do?

2 pointscatskull1 comment

We've all worked at places where individuals mess things up. What's the worst case you've ever seen? I'm not talking about an intern breaking production on their first day, that's an organizational issue. I'm talking about someone doing intentional damage either by political grandstanding, refusal to work with a team, arrogance, or even willful ignorance.

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A fellow consultant at a customer somehow managed to fudge up his connection strings and spent a whole day developing a batch ordering function _in production_. At 4:58 he noticed and then the whole team had to stay and fix it before midnight.

After that, the orders would be processed and inventory worth ~€500k would be ordered for our customer customers customers (yes, three levels deep).

Thankfully we managed to salvage it but the other guy never returned.

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