Technology

Look at me, I am the killswitch now.

I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.

Why do kill switches when you can just hog all the work of maintaining some critical part of the infrastructure and make it's functioning and maintenance so opaque and impenetrable that the employer can't replace or fire you without their shit catching fire soon after.

This is literally my firm's core business practice. We've been at it for so long that at this point we have to be included in competing bids because we are the only ones in the world that can do certain specific things.

That's what my old company used to do. You did this? Do a KT to some underpaid remote employee and when they leave it's again your responsibility to maintain it, alongside the new bugs and spaghetti they introduced.

We once told a SP50 customer that we would not provide a business critical service because an employee went on sabatical for a month and she had the only working version on her cookery computer. At that point the customer was so integrated with us that it would take them years to replace us.

so opaque and impenetrable that the employer can’t replace or fire you without their shit catching fire soon after.

Somehow, that's the kinda roles I always land in lol

Initially makes me wonder how the employer could be so dumb as to give one employee so much access.

Right now, just based purely on the access I need to do my day-to-day job involves me having access where I can pretty much nuke everything from orbit, with an ssh loop.

At some point, you need to trust your employees, in order to get work done. Sure, you can lock it all down tightly, but then you just made work take longer. It's a trade off.

Initially makes me wonder how the employer could be so dumb as to give one employee so much access.

The amount of access he had doesn't surprise me. He'd been there for 11 years already likely working on many things as he interacted with systems in the course of his legitimate work. While its possible to set up access and permissions in an organization utilizing the "least privilege principle", its expensive, difficult to maintain, and adds lots of slowdowns in velocity to business operations. Its worth it to prevent this exact case from the article, but lots of companies don't have the patience or can't afford it.

My previous work didn't revoked my access to their CMS. I was so upset when they laid me off after telling them my wife is pregnant.

But I ain't that stupid.

Oh yeah, but the thing that usually offsets the intrusive thoughts is a lot of courts treat this as the crime of "hurting rich people" which comes with like 30 years in pound you in the ass penitentiary.

I'm sure DOGE is actively considering hiring him.