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Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

Many programmers who automate portions of their workload will use the extra time they gain to place bugs in the systems. When those systems fail, they quickly fix them and look like a savior. If they are on after-hours standby, they make extra money from the callouts. They thus reduce the stress in their own jobs, but increase the stress in other peoples jobs.

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I can't tell if this is satirical or not.

When I have "free time" at work, I put that time towards refactoring, improving/expanding test coverage, and scouting out potential performance boosts through our logs, load records, etc.

Do devs in actual programming positions do this?

Wow we don't live in the same world here, programmer actually is mainly the job of automating tasks, so when I'm finished automating things, I automate other things.

I'm not placing bugs that would be so easy to uncover by my peers using the most rudimentary source control, and make me look like a fraud in front of all the company...

This is borderline criminal, and should be caught with processes / code review.

Did you really see a lot of such cases??

When I worked in IT, both in mainframe programming and before that in ops, I saw many cases of this. "borderline" is just another word for "plausibly deniable". Programmers doing it can claim to have made a mistake. Managers turn a blind eye to it because it's easier than getting pay rises for staff they don't want to leave.

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