Is that illegal though? Sure, if you can PROVE it is done on purpose then maybe, but assuming you cannot then is it? Because if it is then any misconfigured version control or any employee that doesn't do what is expected of them is also breaking the law.
Is it worth the risk to find out? Court ain't cheap, even if you win.
As an employee of a company that provides you a paycheck, you "owe" them your best effort. If you don't want to try, quit - but don't sabotage. That is juvenile and perhaps illegal and certainly unethical.
> Yeah, and the company "owes" you as high a salary as they can possibly afford...
When a company makes a job offer, you agree on the salary. For X dollars, you agree to be their employee and do your job. Your job is not to sabotage a project or commit binaries where people should commit source code...
Pretty sure if you had employees you would not love it if they did that.
Seems pretty straightforward to me: the intellectual property of the code this employee was developing lies with the company (per default).
Either he still has the code, in which case he's supposed to hand it over.
Or he deliberately destroyed it, which means destruction of company property. Deliberate? Yes, because a programmer claiming "oh didn't realize you wanted to keep the source codes!" is not going to fly very far in court.
(BTW I'm modelling this on my assumptions about how this would play in Dutch court, which can be delightfully pragmatic. So there might be some differences how this would work in the USA, such as others commented, ability to afford justice in the first place)
