Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

WHO, ME? The past may be a foreign country, but it's one The Register likes to explore each Friday in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your tales of workplace mistakes and great escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Walter," who once worked for one half of a duopoly competing in the intertwined markets for bad poetry celebrating memorable life moments and questionable television dramatizing the sentiments in those poems. The duopoly didn't make for a stable industry. "We produced a steady cycle of layoffs and hiring," Walter lamented. He nonetheless survived the latest round of layoffs and found himself upgrading systems from Python 2 to Python 3. "Our vendors had stopped pretending Python 2 was still a reasonable life choice," he told The Register. That move coincided with an upgrade to a new version of Linux that happily ran Python 3. "The older one technically could too, but only after a series of rituals involving symbolic links, configuration tweaks, and what I can only describe as informed superstition. It worked on about 80 percent of our systems and the remaining 20 percent flatly refused to cooperate for reasons nobody could explain." Walter told us he blamed the problem on a recent change of vendor in the office cafeteria. "It fit the evidence about as well as anything else," he wrote. Everyone on the team knew the upgrade-resistant 20 percent had to be fixed, but the recent redundancies had left morale so low that nobody was willing to pull the necessary all-nighters. The fact that some of the staff had decided to drink their way through the situation didn't help either. "One morning, fueled by spectacularly bad coffee and the news that a job interview had been pushed back another week, I had what can only be described as a terrible idea," Walter admitted. "What if I simply pointed Python 3 at Python 2?" He tried it by adding the following symbolic link to a script: ln -s /usr/bin/python2 /usr/bin/python3 "I expected fire. Or alarms. Or at least one very concerned email," he told The Register. "Instead... it worked. Not 'mostly worked.' It worked well enough that nothing complained, nothing paged us, and nobody noticed." Walter celebrated his success by leaving the following comment in the configuration script: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know, I know. At least I was mostly sober so it can't be THAT dumb!" Eight years later, Walter had thankfully moved on to another job, although he still checked LinkedIn occasionally. During one visit to Microsoft's bottomless trove of B2B sales advice, he spotted a message from one of the remaining workers at the poetry/television company. The survivor reported that the last Linux upgrade was finally complete. "They'd also finally found the symbolic link, after it survived a move from a script to Ansible," Walter told Who, Me? Has a moment of exasperation or desperation come back to haunt you? If so, don't get frustrated: click here to share your story with Who, Me? Our mailbag has seen better days, so fresh contributions are especially welcome. ®

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