[HN Gopher] A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired b...
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       A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they
       started (2020)
        
       Author : scarmoo
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2024-07-14 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
        
       | mifydev wrote:
       | You had me in the first half. I thought that during that time "no
       | blame culture" wasn't a thing, especially since Bill Gates's
       | leading style was yelling a lot. Either way, it's great that they
       | kept the employee.
        
       | HenryBemis wrote:
       | To be fair, if they fired him, they should have fired everyone
       | else in the chain of command that knew about this and left it in
       | the codebase.
        
         | simonh wrote:
         | Isn't the implication that it wasn't spotted and therefore
         | nobody else knew?
        
         | guywithahat wrote:
         | They didn't fire him. The joke of the article is they said he
         | was no longer with the company because he took a 2-week break
         | in between his internship and starting full-time. The point is
         | he got away free(ish) through pure luck, and the break was
         | planned before any of this happened.
        
       | fuzzythinker wrote:
       | Bad title. As stated in the article, the employee was not fired,
       | he's just an intern that left for 2 weeks before returning as a
       | full-time. PR team reported (truthfully) that the employee is no
       | longer with the company, but the article seems to indicate that
       | company still honored the full employment after.
        
         | slater wrote:
         | That's the joke.
        
           | monktastic1 wrote:
           | I know that jokes are ruined by explaining them, but... could
           | you explain the joke here? I also read it as misdirection.
        
             | Orangeair wrote:
             | The joke is that Microsoft was truthfully able to say "the
             | individual responsible is no longer with the company", a
             | phrase which normally implies that someone has been fired
             | as a direct consequence of the event, without actually
             | firing anyone. The statement was true because the
             | individual responsible had finished their internship, and
             | hadn't yet been brought back as a full-time employee.
        
               | coldtea wrote:
               | That's not "the" joke, or even a joke, that's just an
               | amusing case of PR spin.
               | 
               | The title doesn't say that employee was fired to refer to
               | that "joke". It says it because it's more clickbaity this
               | way.
        
               | bravetraveler wrote:
               | Agreed - if the other parties earnestly believed it...
               | this reinforces the whole _' someone must be punished'_
               | mindset. I don't know. People can be mad.
        
       | willsmith72 wrote:
       | Fun anecdote, but do you buy it? An intern can really get this
       | kind of change through approval to a test build? Who are they,
       | Jia Tan?
        
         | teraflop wrote:
         | You might be shocked to learn that code review processes more
         | than 30 years ago might not have been quite as ubiquitous and
         | robust as they are now.
         | 
         | Back in the day, there were all kinds of hidden Easter eggs in
         | MS products, some of them much more elaborate than this:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Easter_eggs_in_Microso...
        
         | cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
         | Yes. I buy it. It's Windows 3.1. What? You think someone
         | should've picked it up in the GitHub PR UI? I say again,
         | Windows 3.1!
        
       | PlunderBunny wrote:
       | I almost caused a version of our product to be shipped with a
       | 'Blah' hyperlink on the About window. I was testing a new style
       | of button, and the About window was just a convenient place to
       | put it. This was a long time ago, prior to our adoption source-
       | control in the company, so I made the builds directly off my
       | laptop. There were many lessons I _should_ have learned, but what
       | I chose to do was to surround all my testing code with #ifdef
       | _DEBUG to make sure it didn't get out to real customers.
        
       | crtified wrote:
       | Funny how it's considered ethically ok to cause a great deal of
       | angst and bother with the bugs and features of corporate
       | releases, provided the problematic elements are entirely couched
       | in 'professional' language and symbology.
        
       | hypeatei wrote:
       | I'm not a fan of easter eggs in code for this exact reason but
       | c'mon... a slip up like that being rolled out to thousands of
       | customers is hilarious.
        
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       (page generated 2024-07-14 23:01 UTC)