Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn
A script that shouldn't have worked, on a project that never ended, for a company that hardly cared
Walter, a reader of The Register, shared his workplace mistake in this week's "Who, Me?" column. He worked for a company in a duopoly that was known for layoffs and hiring cycles. After surviving a recent layoff, Walter upgraded systems from Python 2 to Python 3. This upgrade coincided with an upgrade to a new version of Linux that ran Python 3 smoothly.
However, the older Python 2 was resistant to the upgrade, and fixing it became a challenge. The company was in low morale due to recent redundancies, and people were drinking their way through the situation. One morning, fueled by bad coffee and a delayed job interview, Walter had the idea to point Python 3 at Python 2 by creating a symbolic link.
To his surprise, it worked perfectly, and nothing complained, paged, or noticed. Walter celebrated his success and left a comment in the configuration script acknowledging his success. Eight years later, Walter still checked LinkedIn occasionally and saw a message from a remaining worker at the company. The worker reported that the last Linux upgrade was finally complete, and they had found the symbolic link after it moved from a script to Ansible.
Written by urgent.news from The Register Software's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
This story
This is one outlet's version. Read the fullest account.
