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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

What lone developer says "let me find all the GPS coordinates of all the train repair shops and make the trains not work if they've been parked there for days"?

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"My cat slept on the keyboard and accidentally developed and merged working advertisement feature into a release build of the new AC game. It was totally on accident, happens all the time." (c) Ubisoft

"I come to you now with apologies. This is the third time my cat has put paid mods into Skyrim, something for which he is very very sorry you are unhappy about."

We talk on HN a lot about ethics and programming and the importance of engineers refusing to develop unethical software.

But I think we need another PSA that, if you are going to write some code that could land you in jail, make sure you get your entire reporting chain in writing telling you to do it, up to and including the CEO and the board of directors.

Alternatively, if you're going to break the law, don't do that (break the law).

Don't underestimate these damned rouge developers!

I've heard of Khmer Rouge but not of Dev Rouge before.

Humor is so little appreciated these days.

Humor is prevalent in the internets various forums. It's well appreciated generally - easy upvotes on Reddit and elsewhere. But that also means that a serious forum with higher signal-to-noise ratio is something uniquely valuable.

All of them. Dieselgate? Rogue dev. Trains breaking for independent shops? Rogue dev. Some airplane going down because of bad software? Rogue dev.

Repeat after me: The company is never at fault.

Perhaps GitHub Autopilot and ChatGPT teamed up to write the code upon noticing that the developer tripped and fell, causing a GSM modem to fall off their desk and into the assembly process.

Management: "a 6-pack of beer for the brilliant dev who figures out a solution to this problem of us ..."

Yeah, sounds like a secret 20% project :)

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