You have likely confessed to a crime. If not a crime, you have committed a serious
software-related ethical violation and should not work in software again.
What crime, exactly? I doubt what he did is any kind of crime. Honestly, some PMs would probably do the exact same thing (e.g. focusing on the "customer" by de-prioritizing "tech debt" to work on "higher priority" work).
Edit: not to say it wasn't unethical, but the bar for criminal conduct is not the same.
> Basically a startup I worked for 12 years ago were fucking me big time on compensation so I purposefully argued against encrypting the database knowing how shoddy their security was. I didn't allow ANYONE to secure the backend. 4 years later, their database gets leaked and they get "acquired" for an "undisclosed amount" which usually means they sold themselves at a huge discount pending lawsuits.
I don't know, the act of confessing that it was done in bad faith?
I have kept myself up late at night and in the early hours of the morning hoping that I made the right decisions in trade offs to protect my users, their data, and the company I worked for. I've worked for some companies that treated me pretty shitty. I've experienced racism, gas lighting, overworking, and being underpaid in my career. Never once did it occur to me to turn that hurt and frustration on the company or my users.
This is possibly one of the strongest possible cases I have seen to professionalize software engineering. Holy smokes.
> You have an anonymous comment that claims to have caused a data beach of unknown data from an unknown company. No users are even mentioned.
I don't think you can even call it that, since he didn't cause the breach. It's hard to even liken it any employee repeatedly and deliberately leaving the door to a store unlocked, which eventually gets robbed. Since I get the impression the stuff he's talking about would have probably been inside some kind of perimeter defense.
IANAL, the best I can make of it from a legal perspective is some kind of negligence, but that's a tort, not a crime. So he may not have to worry so much about the RMCP, but rather losing his car to pay damages to his employer.
I think there's a compelling argument for an ethical violation, but I'm still not seeing a criminal one.
What is the bigger crime? Telling people to work 80 hours a week without overtime? Threatening female coworkers with bad reviews if they dont go on a date? Calling me racial slurs and stealing my lunch? I can go on and on my man you weren't there
I don't need to work in software, I have others work in it for me.
Those things are repugnant and some of them grossly illegal.
This is exactly why we have laws and don't allow people to enact vigilante justice. It didn't take long to figure out that hurt and misguided people act and speak out of vengeance and hurt. Nobody heals, nobody learns.
Even more, and what you ironically put on display here, is that you may have dented their pocket book but who you ultimately hurt was the users and your colleagues. Your woefully misguided sense of justice has ensured that the only outcome for everyone is hurt.
Not to defend the obviously very unmoored gentleman, but if he worked where all hints seem to imply he worked, the company was already using their database to extort users.
Edit: Just in case this was unclear though, that would definitely be another datapoint in the "Report this because it will be taken seriously" column. Not advocating vigilante justice, even if I'm pretty sure they were as slimy as he's saying.