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Comment by snoopsnopp | Hacker News Reader

I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.

It was an internal tool and the VP was the head of IT. Everything still worked, it was just painful to use. He could have pulled the plug on it at any time.

I don't think any of those details matter, that's still illegal and you could've gotten in trouble legally.

I'm curious; what law was being broken, exactly?

Breaking fiduciary duty would be the first that comes to my mind.

Previous user took a very huge risk. I've seen similar stuff happen, you can get sued (along whoever told you, but you need proof) just for the sake of making an example in front of the rest of the company.

CEO can say it is his fiduciary duty to phase out old software and put a brand spanking new modern enterprise grade system.

Also, still it is not illegal. Just that the shareholders need to sue him to matter at all.

Where do you think fiduciary duty exists as a random software dev?

Fiduciary duty is a particular legal concept about the responsibility one party has to another, and only applies in specific, defined circumstances. A random developer doesn't have a fiduciary duty to anyone, and he wasn't taking any risk.

Sibling commenters: for what it's worth, the notion of an employee having a fiduciary duty to their employer isn't as crazy as it sounds. eg, see here: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1...

That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty. If they weren't acting to their employer's benefit, then whose? Employee fiduciary duty cases tend to be more about things like embezzling or competing with your own company while you're still working there.

An example of Fox getting shut down for trying to claim that sexual harassment was a breach of fiduciary duty: https://www.barnespc.com/news-articles/limitations-on-the-sc...

> That said, I think it'd be a pretty tough argument to make that an employee following the instructions of their superior was breaching fiduciary duty.

There has to be proof about that. If everything was verbal how do you prove it?

There's no way around the fact that sabotaging your company is illegal and a breach of contract.

The leap you took from following your director's expectations to sunset a product to sabotaging your company is pretty epic.

Thanks for the correction, TIL.

What law was broken?

I don’t see how it’s any different than Windows ME.

The operative word is “internal” in OPs post.

Incentives and adoption goals for internal tools are weird at large corps. Intentional suckage is just another tool to drive migration

Even if it were an external tool, I fail to understand how there would be a legal problem. Companies use all sorts of shenanigans to encourage users to migrate. Immoral? Sure, but software crossed that bridge a long time ago.

Heaps of people online have stories about how Microsoft tricked them into upgrading Windows.

What laws do you think making a bad tool violates?

but you can't seem to name which crime.

morality <> legality

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