Stupid question but what is stopping the software engineers to poison the well?

Great question. I agree with other responses - it happens, and there’s motive to hush it up, so we tend not to hear about it.

It’s also just really hard to tell the difference after the fact between “Dave sabotaged us” and “no one knows how to do what Dave did”.

But I’ll add - there’s currently little need motive sabotage AI implementations. Current generation AI is largely unable to deliver on what is promised, in a business sense. It does cool but useless things, like quickly generating low maturity code, and writing a summary any seven year old could have wtitten.

Current generation AI adds very little business value, while creating substantial risks. Nevermind that no one knows how Dave worked, now no one knows how our AI works, and it’s so eager to please everyone that it lies at critical moments.

Companies playing around with current generation AI to boost next quarter’s stocks will hit plenty of “find out” soon enough, with nothing beyond the natural consequences of ignoring their own engineers advice.

All that to say - if we see what looks like sabotage, it may well just be the natural consequences of stupidity.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/developer-guilty-of-using-kill-switch-to-sabotage-employers-systems/

10 years in jail is what’s stopping them.

It’s REALLY hard to create a dead man’s switch that works, but also leaves no trace. Even if you delete the script after it executes, there’s probably backups or logs that show what happened.

Nah, not stupid. But yeah it’s hard to do without leaving a very clear trail. I assume most engineers want to keep their job and their income.

But programmers tend to use some form of a “versioning” system like git. This will record everyone’s changes to the codebase, when a change was made, what was changed, who changed it. And it allows you to go back and revert changes if something important broke. Very convenient for programmers, less convenient for sabotage.

It’s not a stupid question. From what I hear, people try stuff like this all the time, stuff like putting a bit of code on your employer’s system that’ll erase important files if you get shit canned and no longer appear on the payroll. It’s why a lot of companies no longer give notice when ppl are fired, just have security walk them out. And unfortunately this stuff is often traceable, which means they’re risking quite serious prosecution.

I don’t like much of what I see, I think it’s becoming clear that some new tech is going to have wide ranging and harmful effects. I’m not sure that doing luddite stuff will help but I can understand why people would think that way.

A company with fuck off amount of legal power?