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The Courts Software United States Hardware IT Technology

Contractor Admits Planting Logic Bombs In His Software To Ensure He'd Get New Work (arstechnica.com) 117

Posted by BeauHD from the rigged-software dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many IT workers worry their positions will become obsolete as changes in hardware, software, and computing tasks outstrip their skills. A former contractor for Siemens concocted a remedy for that -- plant logic bombs in projects he designed that caused them to periodically malfunction. Then wait for a call to come fix things. On Monday, David A. Tinley, a 62-year-old from Harrison City, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of $7,500 in the scheme. The sentence came five months after he pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer. Tinley was a contract employee for Siemens Corporation at its Monroeville, Pennsylvania, location.

According to a charging document filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the logic bombs Tinley surreptitiously planted into his projects caused them to malfunction after a certain preset amount of time. Because Siemens managers were unaware of the logic bombs and didn't know the cause of the malfunctions, they would call Tinley and ask him to fix the misbehaving projects. The scheme ran from 2014 to 2016. Tinley will be under supervised release for two years following his prison term. He will also pay restitution. The parties in the case stipulated a total loss amount of $42,262.50. Tinley faced as much as 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
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Contractor Admits Planting Logic Bombs In His Software To Ensure He'd Get New Work More

Contractor Admits Planting Logic Bombs In His Software To Ensure He'd Get New Work

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  • Oh how I do love the smell of coerced false confession in the morning!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      All he really had to do was follow the specifications precisely.

      After a while, the inadequacy of the specs or the rigidity of the solution requires a revisit.

      • I'm quite sure Microsoft made BILLIONS doing very nearly the same thing. Their stuff has always just MOSTLY worked... well enough for C-suite types and consultants to both recommend... and the consultants would incidentally get years of works fixing the MOSTLY working Microsoft software.

        • Well, sort of. I heard that back in the days of MS-Access '97, there was a built-in database size limit which was much smaller than the physical database size limit. The reason to set it at such a small size was to force users to upgrade to SQL Server.

          • No, nothing that straightforward. MS-Access didn't behave with complete ACID compliance. As your database grew in size and simultaneous users, it would randomly malfunction.The easiest solution was to reimplement with a SQL Server back-end linked to a front-end using ODBC. Been there done that.

            As an aside, SQL Server was the only decent MS product in that day, IMHO.

    • Re:"pleaded guilty" (Score:4, Informative)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:04AM (#59541226)

      What makes you think it was a Coerced?

      Sometimes you may be obviously guilty and making a long drawn out court case for you to be called guilty Then you get the same punishment + have to pay extra legal fees + you may get extra punishment (the judge may push towards the maximum sentence) for wasting the time.

      Vs Declaring Guilty go less legal costs and get a lower punishment.

      His lawyer after looking at the evidence probably recommended him to plea guilty as he can probably get a better sentence, as there may be no chance he could win.

      Also he may know if there is a full investigation on it, they may find more material of misconduct that can make things worse.

      • Re: "pleaded guilty" (Score:5, Informative)

        by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:54AM (#59541412)

        Does bootleather really taste that good to you?

        Under the heinously evil "plea bargain" system that is utterly destroying the legitimacy of our court system, ALL confessions are coerced confessions. That's exactly what "plea bargain" means. And all coerced confessions are ipso facto false confessions.

        Stand up, man! For God's sake, stand up for human decency! Stop giving these contemptible villains the aid and comfort of your words. When the very halls of justice are turned to a cackling mockery of all that is just and honest, good men MUST speak out against it.

        • What an hysterical load of bullshit.

          • Re: "pleaded guilty" (Score:4)

            by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @11:11AM (#59541468)

            My language was perhaps too florid. Yet the truth remains: the "plea bargain" system is a mockery of justice.

          • Re: "pleaded guilty" (Score:4, Interesting)

            by r_naked ( 150044 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @11:25AM (#59541528) Homepage

            It most certainly is NOT a hysterical load of bullshit. The plea bargain system needs to go away -- it is literally the DA bribing you to plead guilty.

            I was in Daytona Beach for spring break, and someone grabbed this drunk chicks ass. I was standing at a table outside a bar (along with three friends), and she was walking down the *middle* of the blocked off road -- a good 15 feet away. Her boyfriend asked her who grabbed her -- she stumbled around, and pointed over at me. He ran over and grabbed me, and it turned out he was an off duty officer -- that was also drunk. He called over an on duty and had me arrested.

            So, I make it to court, and plead not guilty and I choose to represent myself since I have 3 witnesses that can vouch that I was standing at the table and never moved -- and I don't have 15 feet arms. The prosecutor offers me 6 months probation, and a $500.00 fine if I plead guilty -- even though one of the witnesses went with me to court, and told her exactly what he was going to testify to. I took the "deal" because I was concerned that since her boyfriend was a cop, he might pull some bullshit made up witnesses out of his ass.

            Bottom line, I was NOT GUILTY, but I plead guilty because we have a FUCKED up system.

            • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

              by Shaitan ( 22585 )

              Been there done that, luckily as a minor. I know many others who've done the same.

              The poorer the evidence the more enticing they make the deal so you have to weigh it against the time and risks of trying to fight it and the public defender won't do anything willingly except negotiate terms. They'll encourage you to take the deal either because they have paying clients to get back to or because their case load is so high there is no other way to manage it.

              Not that anyone should face legal consequences over g

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by MPAB ( 1074440 )

              I'm a doctor in Spain. During my residency I was on call for general medicine and had to see a patient that was out of the speciality I was preparing for.
              The guy had been admitted for an infection. He was getting the right antibiotics, his vitals were normal. They called me because he had thrown up (as he had a few times earlier that day). The tests were normal.
              Five hours later the guy went very quickly into septic shock and died in a matter of minutes. I never knew about that because another doctor took th

        • The guy was caught red-handed. He was forced to hand over the password for his spreadsheet and he was found out because he was not available to fix an urgent problem that he caused. If this would have gone to trial, a jury would have convicted him in a heartbeat. In this case, a pleas bargain is a win for him and that is the way it should work.

          • You say that. Yet he was _not_ convicted in open court by a jury of his peers. He was coerced to confess. No one actually knows if a jury would have found him guilty - we can only speculate based on one-sided propaganda.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Megol ( 3135005 )

          I read the first line and skipped the rest. What's with the internet exposing all kinds of cranks?

  • Vacation got him (Score:5, Informative)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:21AM (#59541114) Journal

    More detailed article at zdnet [zdnet.com].

    The spreadshees included custom scripts that would update the content of the file based on current orders stored in other, remote documents, allowing the company to automate inventory and order management. But while Tinley's files worked for years, they started malfunctioning around 2014. According to court documents, Tinley planted so-called "logic bombs" that would trigger after a certain date, and crash the files. Every time the scripts would crash, Siemens would call Tinley, who'd fix the files for a fee. The scheme lasted for two years, until May 2016, when Tinley's trickery was unraveled by Siemens employees. According to a report from Law360, the scheme fell apart when Tinley was out of town, and had to hand over an administrative password for the spreadsheets to Siemens' IT staff, so they could fix the buggy scripts and fill in an urgent order.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Amouth ( 879122 )

      i'm not sure whom is the criminal here.. the guy who broke the "spreadsheets" or Siemens who insisted on using "spreadsheets"... i mean him breaking them was some of the best free consulting they could have gotten...

      In my line of work i run across the use of spreadsheets far more than i ever should - and it never ceases to amaze me how many large corporations have rather high value/critical processes facilitated by nothing but Excel....

      • Re:Vacation got him (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:54AM (#59541188) Homepage Journal

        I'm not sure this guy needs prison time. What is the benefit to society of the prison term? The community supervision seems to be just as well.

        • Re:Vacation got him (Score:5, Insightful)

          by fibonacci8 ( 260615 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:47AM (#59541382)
          What's a little industrial sabotage mixed with extortion now and then?
        • Why do you think that deliberately abusing's one access to set up a system to defraud a business is only worth of community supervision? If you had someone build you device and it repeated failed so that you had to call the person you paid to create it to come fix it for a fee then found out that the person in question sabotaged it to defraud you, would you be OK with community supervision? I think not.

          • Why do you think that deliberately abusing's one access to set up a system to defraud a business is only worth of community supervision?

            Because if it's unlikely he'll commit new crimes under community supervision, then any more-harmful action is strictly unethical.

            would you be OK with community supervision?

            Well it'll save me from paying taxes to house him at a rate of $70,000/year while gaining no benefit, and it will avoid the ethical cost of taking away more of his liberty and freedom than is strictly necessary to control the threat to society he may represent, if there is no such credible ongoing threat he represents which cannot be controlled without imprisonment. It would al

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:55AM (#59541192)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Amouth ( 879122 )

          Well it sounds like they where using it to manage a supply chain operation, so yea its pretty bad. This isn't "snobbery" this is common sense.. Spreadsheets are awesome for doing analysis, or prototyping data shapes.. but when it comes to managing the data for a business process i'd rank it higher risk than a paper system.

          So yea,

        • It's not that spreadsheets are bad, it's that through that ease of use you mention, they enable people to do bad things with them. I have seen some truly monstrous spreadsheets which should have been applications instead, particularly given the amount of time that had been dumped into them to make them work and keep them functional.

          To put it another way, they overly cater to a layman's way of thinking of solutions, instead of a fully fledged language which is more robust but requires one to think in terms

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I'm more annoyed by how much of an amateur this guy is.

          Contractors write software exactly to spec for this reason. Oh, you need to it not crash when you type one to many digits, well that's a change so I'll bill you.

          There are so many ways they can keep the work coming endlessly just by creating what look like problems created by the company.

        • Sorry, right tool for the right job. Excel is great for what it is but it's not sql.

        • Re:Vacation got him (Score:4, Insightful)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @12:36PM (#59541788) Journal

          Spreadsheets as rule don't provide for
          1) Change Control
          2) Role based access control
          3) Audit trails
          4) Any kind of redundancy / fail-over

          They fail for ever leg of the security triad; Confidentiality, availability, integrity. The moment they morph from being a collection of current information or tool used to do some analysis into any sort of system of record or shared application.

          Its not snobbery. Sheets are great for proving things out, prototyping of all kinds of things, one-time-analysis efforts etc. They are NOT great critical processes.

      • Hey, look everybody! It's the broken window fallacy!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Amouth ( 879122 )

          not exactly - i'd say it's closer to show how fragile the house of cards is in a way which is not hugely detrimental, to give them a chance to realize what they have before having a catastrophic failure.

      • Also, they had production code in a spreadsheet, and the contractor was the only one with the password to change it? Sounds like the management was pretty clueless.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Amouth ( 879122 )

          I agree with you, but i find it ironic that as i read this, the quote on the page is

          "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

    • A lot of the Y2K "fixes" used the years 2014 and 2015 as the cutoff time assuming the company would had been nuts to use the product for that many more years later. But never underestimate Siemens for using old and outdated stuff.

      • A lot of the Y2K "fixes" used the years 2014 and 2015 as the cutoff time
        I never heard about nonsense like this ...

    • Re:Vacation got him (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jythie ( 914043 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:20AM (#59541282)
      Wait, so Siemens let the outside contractor retain the administrative password, but not give their own in house staff access to it? That is so incompetent I am wondering if whoever managed the guy was in on the scam.

    • and had to hand over an administrative password for the spreadsheets to Siemens' IT staff

      Seriously? Here you go, Siemens. This one is on the house.

      Sub BreakPassword()

      Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
      Dim l As Integer, m As Integer, n As Integer
      Dim i1 As Integer, i2 As Integer, i3 As Integer
      Dim i4 As Integer, i5 As Integer, i6 As Integer

      On Error Resume Next

      For i = 65 To 66: For j = 65 To 66: For k = 65 To 66
      For l = 65 To 66: For m = 65 To 66: For i1 = 65 To 66
      For i2 = 65 To 66: For i3 = 65 To 66: For i4 = 65 To 66
      For i5 = 65 To 66: For i6 = 65 To 66: For n = 32 To 126

      Act

  • I wonder if this isn't quite common, actually.
    Not specific logic bombs per se, but more or less intentional half-assed work that the developer would have designed to be only good enough for the present and which would need maintenance later on.
    With many software projects being rushed anyway, thus forcing solutions to be half-assed to meet the release deadline, it would become easier to get away with doing it intentionally in those cases when you did have enough time to do it well.

    I'm sure various software m

    • You don’t even need logic bombs if your code is messy, uses obscure approaches, and is poorly documented. I think enough people have to deal with that kind of mess even when it was just stupidly rather than malice that was responsible and realize how much time it can take to not only sort that knotted ball of yarn itself out, but then to patch up side effects due to the original code hooking into other pets of the system in perplexing ways.

      • "Pets of the system. "
        When software starts to keep pets I think we can all agree it passes the Turing test

      • Timers are pretty easy to spot...
      • Oh, yeah, fully agree. I was contracted into SW Bell to help them migrate. One system was written by this Silver guy. The main control paragraph was FORTY pages long (I still have a copy to show people). No one else there could understand it (understandably). He also bucked standards: "Don't use literals.", so he used names like LIT-R for all his literals. It was the most in your face bunch of self-serving bullshit programming I'd ever seen.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      The major difference is that half-assed code will still need to actually be fixed. Sure it should have been done right the first time, but in many ways you can view the revisiting as part of the 'you did not fund this correctly in the first place so this is an extension of that initial cost'. So while it was avoidable work, they are still doing work. Logic bombs on the other hand just require setting a new date and then pretend to have 'fixed' the bug.
    • Well there have been a few jobs I’ve had where I was told to put something in place “that works” despite my documented warnings about the solution being only temporary. After I left the companies, it’s not my problem anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It depends about the business situation. I, for example, only sometimes write software and when I do it, I do it at full consulting rates. I never did anything shoddy or intentionally bad and my stuff rarely cause problems. But customers expect good work at my rates and not delivering that would be really bad for business. A regular coder gets less than half of my hourly rate and a lot less time to do things. I do fully understand if they half-ass a lot of stuff and sometimes let problems intentionally unfi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      I don't think its done intentionally very often. I think it just happens a lot.

      Anytime you have an application that requires a significant amounts institutional, vertical, and domain specific knowledge to build, and time pressure to get it done you'll end up here.

      Even things like code reviews etc usually don't prevent it. Because there is nobody with the domain knowledge to do anything but a rather proforma - "well it follows the style guide and I don't see anything stupid here like bubble sort. Beyond tha

  • Illegal as hell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LenKagetsu ( 6196102 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:42AM (#59541162)
    But, when a manufacturer deliberately rigs their product to fall apart the moment the warranty expires, it's fucking kosher.

    • Re:Illegal as hell (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moryath ( 553296 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:55AM (#59541194)
      When a contractor does this they call it a "logic bomb".

      When a company like SPSS (whose software self-destructs if you change the system clock back by a couple hours) does it, they call it "terms of service".

      Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
      • It's sleazy, no doubt, but clients and corporate types play dirty too. I once did a coding project for a client who refused to pay. The program worked as he wanted and as specified. Come 35 days past due, I flipped a value in my phone home web site's database. The program then dutifully stopped functioning. I told him to pay up, and he became very angry. He wanted my work for free. I never told him how I did it. Had he paid, I would have recompiled with the phone home functions removed. I ended up

    • People voted with their wallets and chose lowest price over everything else. When its a race to the bottom everything is garbage. Like the old saying goes: good, fast, cheap. Pick two.

      • Planned obsolescence is the act of deliberately rigging a product to break after a period of time. It's no different from sabotage or throwing termites into a barn.
      • These days it's more like; good, fast, cheap, not at the center of an antitrust lawsuit brought by a huge company who struggles to pay for the CEO's second private jet.
    • Go take your olanzapine

    • There is a difference in 'how' you do it.
      It is something that is more difficult to do in software as it doesn't 'age' per se.

      So manufacturers can 'cut' corners knowing it will make the product fail at some point. Yet, they can easily say, we used this plastic gear instead of this metal gear to reduce costs.

      There's no doubt manufacturers play games with planned obsolescence. But there is a difference with playing games, and just doing it explicitly outright.

      Most software companies don't have products with bu

  • Amateur... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @09:43AM (#59541168)

    Contractor Admits Planting Logic Bombs In His Software To Ensure He'd Get New Work

    Meh, that's still work. Nothing has yet beaten out that developer who outsourced his development work to China and then spent his days at work surfing the web. https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

  • I am midway in my career and had to change default languages learn some new ones. Discover some new methodologies implement them into my own. It is a part of being in IT. One thing I have found the more things change the more they stay the same and computing designs run in a pattern. Client Side Programming vs Server Side Programming. Complex API systems vs simple string manipulation.

    About a decade ago I heard some buzz around restful services. So I just did a Google on it, Using the HTTP repsonse codes

    • In my case the biggest concern turned out not to stay current (this turned out to be easy), but to have to deal with one hipster framework per month (every hour they say will be the solution to all the problems in the universe) to the next month the framework becomes obsolete (or worse, fails in a fantastic way).

      This may even be acceptable when you are doing a hobby project, but it is not at all acceptable when you are making systems that will be used for decades.

      • The framework of the month usually just means staying current with the terminology as it is often some kid who just got their CS Degree and reinvented something old that they didn't teach in college, and gave it their own name.

        These 20 year old kids do not have 30 years experience in this technology that is 3 months old.
        Us old guys may actually have decades experience in this 3 month old technology. It just had a different name back then.

  • This kind of reminds me of the Underhanded C Contest where the entire point was to do something like this. However it had to do something malicious that wouldn’t be obvious upon examination of the code and could be passed off as an honest mistake.

  • certificate updates can be seen as logic bombs yearly.

    • How can they be logic bombs when the expiration date isn’t hidden? It’s not like anyone has pull in obscure commands to see the expiration date of a certificate. That’s like saying yearly software subscriptions are logic bombs. Speaking of which, I know someone who actually runs a web hosting company. His biggest pain is getting clients to renew things like certificates despite numerous emails, voice messages, and text messages reminding them that their certificate, domain registration, et

      • except the cartel that controls them has shortened the life of them recently, no more 3 year certs. that racket needs to be broken, it's a burden on people and business with not a lot of money. and that stupid Let's Encrypt bullshit isn't a solution, doesn't work with all systems nor is it useful for e-commerce payment system needing stored cert when it craps out every 30 days.

        parasites inserting themselves in middlemen when a free alternative could be used instead, like keys in DNS.

        • Again how is that a logic bomb? I don’t have a yearly subscription to Office 365 but it is clear in the terms of service how long my subscription would last. If I let it lapse and Office 365 stops working, it’s not a logic bomb.

          • I'm only saying SSL certificates are a similar racket, too much money charged for something which takes almost no effort, and a smarter solution that provides equivalent level of security without paying anyone could be done.

  • Everybody knows you have to be a corporation to get away with planned obsolescence.

  • Really, that's all there is to it in this case.

    I'm honestly kinda surprised though that Siemens apparently doesn't have a formal review process that is good enough to catch stuff like this, unless Tinley is a past winner of the obfuscated C code contest or something...

  • Placing bugs that are not identifiable as anything except bugs is not that hard. You want them in corner-cases, in obscure cases and in cases that would obviously not be well-tested and rarely relevant. What this person seems to have done instead was explicit "fail at date" code that is blatantly obvious to any forensic analysis.

    No, I do not advise to do this. But I teach how to defend against backdoors in code and that needs examples. The best ones are always ones that plausibly could be bugs. With these,

    • What the NSA and other TLAs definitely failed to do was to draw attention to the massive problem bad coders represent.

      You gotta admit that would have been rather unnecessary as we've known about that issue for more than thirty years. I'm not going to search it out, but I'd bet you can find /. and industry articles on that topic from very early on.

      • And, as if to validate my assumption, a lower post includes a Dilbert from 1995 on that topic.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. Still, the part of the NSA charged with protecting critical infrastructure and the economy should have given louder and louder warnings about the problem as it became worse due to more and more dependency on working IT.

  • Scott Adams charged as co-conspirator (Score:4, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:35AM (#59541344) Journal
    The accused said he got the inspiration from this [medium.com] So FBI is planning indict Scott Adams as the co-conspirator.

  • Goose/Gander (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @10:48AM (#59541388) Journal

    How is this different from any planned obsolescence? It's OK when Apple does it but not when it's an individual protecting an income stream?

    • are you making shit up? we have a 8 year old imac at home that works perfectly.

      • are you making shit up? we have a 8 year old imac at home that works perfectly.

        OK, so here's a challenge:

        Take a 5 year old iPad. Wipe it and put a new Apple ID on it. Now try to install some apps like Facebook, Chrome, etc. App Store will tell you, "No way, Jose. You've got to update your iOS to a version that won't run on it first". However, if you violate the Apple TOS and temporarily log in with an Apple ID that has another device with those apps already installed, App Store will offer to let you do

        • I just got a replacement iPad Air 2 for an iPad gen 4 that broke. It was made in 2014. It runs the latest release 13.3 (as of today). I can run whatever software I want. Even the iPad 4 runs nearly everything. It's latest release was 10.3.4 but it would still install nearly all software and older versions of the popular apps it couldn't. So a 7 year old iPad was 95-99% functional and was missing stuff like "dark mode" and the animojis.

          Dang. Don't get me wrong, yes it's planned obsolescence but the lifecy

          • yes it's planned obsolescence but the lifecycle is long and frankly the performance one would get on older chips is either impossible (new features) or would be an awful user experience.

            I have an iPod 3 hand-me-down that works great, but I had to break the TOS to get apps to load because...planned obsolescence.

            Sometimes, an old piece of gear is a great way to introduce the platform to someone. Apple tries to make that impossible (without violating terms of service) because they want you to buy a new one.

            • I don't think "thy do it", I believe it is just a mistake.
              And if you would stop ranting on /. about and simply send them a letter, they probably even would fix it.

              • And if you would stop ranting on /. about and simply send them a letter, they probably even would fix it.

                Oh, I've done that. And posted on Apple forums. And explained the issue to the people at the "Genius Bar".

    • If you sold a piece of tech as guaranteed not to be obsolete in five years, you'd be sued in two or sooner. Proving planned obsolescence vs. obsolescence is like proving Trump did something wrong. The CEO said no planned obsolescence, see, so it's not obsolete.

  • Guess that company doesn't know about pull requests.

  • So, this is basically the foundation for cybersecurity and the rental business model industry that's grown up around it. "For a nominal monthly service fee, we'll claim to ensure that nobody can scam county records offices and steal your property title." "For a low monthly fee, we'll claim to protect your social security number." "For only $9.95 a month, we'll claim to screen out robodialers."

  • Software contractors do the same things as normal contractors?

  • No way in hell that IT will get thrown away or replaced by scripts, robots, intelligent software or anything to replace IT. No way in hell. I say this with respect but people are too dumb to get away from IT. They need IT and will call IT for all kinds of things. They will call them for real problems and other times for idiot simple things. People will even challenge the most intelligent or best software or script in the world. I even predict some script to delete themselves(suicide) from stupid demands so
  • I told my boss once that I should put a "service timer" in my software so I could go back and "fix" it once in a while.

  • I had a similar career, but ... (Score:3)

    by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Friday December 20, 2019 @01:54PM (#59542076)

    ... it was a lot easier and it was legal.

    Managers made decisions based on articles they'd read in the Wall Street Journal despite my recommendations to let me do my job.

    One example: A managing partner said, "Hey ... I read in the WSJ that a sever only cost $599 and ours cost us $22,000. Why aren't you buying a server like that?"

    I said, "Boss, let's go on line and order us one."

    He went out to his car and got the article and we went online.

    So, there it was: Server for $599.

    We added that to the cart. I asked him, "What server operating system do you want?"

    Blank look. We chose Windows, added to cart.

    "What RAID?" Blank look. I talked him into RAID 5, hot swappable. Added to cart.

      "We need a backup tape." Added to cart.

    Being a busy lawyer, he gave in at that point.

  • How is this any different than the mortgage crisis created by the banks. By creating any sort of highly leveraged deal, not only do you make money when things are working, but you make more to come fix up the mess after they fail. This is especially true when you have knowledge and access to specialized good, stemming from auto supplies to iPhone essentials to financial products.
  • Why couldn't he just do a piss poor job, then he would also still have more work and its legal

  • There's a zombie joke in here but I'm too tired to craft it.

    Please tell me that someone gets it.

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