I ran my colleague's code - should I get fired?
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Hey guys, would love your two cents on this. Being the careful guy that I am, I need som pointers to figure out if I've been the victim of a cross over-reaction (my own estimate) or if I should start getting my act together (always a possiblity). The short version: I'm in a minitry of education government stats department. We're three asp.net guys who churn out various web-surveys for the schools to fill out. Recently we went public with one particular survey. Being the ever curious and eager to learn individual, I thought I'd take a look at the code behind it. This is the day after it's gone public. One reason being that I'd recently been put to the task of supporting another guy's project when he was unforseenably away, and I anticipated that situation might creep up again, that I'd have to support this one too. Another reason being that I simply like to look at other people's code, to try and learn something new. In this case, alas, not so much new stuff had gone into it. I say 'new', because I wrote the bulk of the code myself, before a brief last-year hiatus which saw this guy, we'll call him 'Lars', take over. So I export the code from the SubVersion repository. I didn't check it out - only exported it. Any changes won't be persisted back into the repository. And I ran it. Guilty as charged. I took a look at the default.aspx, went a bit further from there, nothing serious, application or server-threatning c# stuff going on here, let's fire this one up and see how it looks... Nope, stops with a error - some server controls dll missing. I had originally authored some server controls to go with the project, but in my youth's inexperience I included these not in a seperate project to be referenced but as stand-alone must-be-compiled-seperately. Would do that differently now, but anyways, I put it down because I had other things to attend to. Alas, the web.config healthmonitoring has dispatched an e-mail to Lars, informing him of the run-time error. And 'Lars' goes ape-shit. He send an e-mail to yours truly, CC three bosses and all of my co-workers, lambasting me for running his code. Heck, I thought all the code we wrote was 'ours'. I'm judged irresponsible (quote "you don't know what you're dealing with, you could've done serious damage to a project in production") for checking out the code (wrong) and running it (true). His argument - and, I suspect, his justification behind CC'ing pretty much everybody I know - is that the crime is severe because the code is in production now. I
Putting CC to his manager in this case is OK, but CC to entire company is hysteria. Explain the situation to YOUR manager using the facts and the facts only and forget about the case – shits happen. Also ask your manager if he wants you to send a response to the other managers involved in the case from Lars. And Lars also needs to learn that there is subordination in the company.
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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Hey guys, would love your two cents on this. Being the careful guy that I am, I need som pointers to figure out if I've been the victim of a cross over-reaction (my own estimate) or if I should start getting my act together (always a possiblity). The short version: I'm in a minitry of education government stats department. We're three asp.net guys who churn out various web-surveys for the schools to fill out. Recently we went public with one particular survey. Being the ever curious and eager to learn individual, I thought I'd take a look at the code behind it. This is the day after it's gone public. One reason being that I'd recently been put to the task of supporting another guy's project when he was unforseenably away, and I anticipated that situation might creep up again, that I'd have to support this one too. Another reason being that I simply like to look at other people's code, to try and learn something new. In this case, alas, not so much new stuff had gone into it. I say 'new', because I wrote the bulk of the code myself, before a brief last-year hiatus which saw this guy, we'll call him 'Lars', take over. So I export the code from the SubVersion repository. I didn't check it out - only exported it. Any changes won't be persisted back into the repository. And I ran it. Guilty as charged. I took a look at the default.aspx, went a bit further from there, nothing serious, application or server-threatning c# stuff going on here, let's fire this one up and see how it looks... Nope, stops with a error - some server controls dll missing. I had originally authored some server controls to go with the project, but in my youth's inexperience I included these not in a seperate project to be referenced but as stand-alone must-be-compiled-seperately. Would do that differently now, but anyways, I put it down because I had other things to attend to. Alas, the web.config healthmonitoring has dispatched an e-mail to Lars, informing him of the run-time error. And 'Lars' goes ape-shit. He send an e-mail to yours truly, CC three bosses and all of my co-workers, lambasting me for running his code. Heck, I thought all the code we wrote was 'ours'. I'm judged irresponsible (quote "you don't know what you're dealing with, you could've done serious damage to a project in production") for checking out the code (wrong) and running it (true). His argument - and, I suspect, his justification behind CC'ing pretty much everybody I know - is that the crime is severe because the code is in production now. I
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Putting CC to his manager in this case is OK, but CC to entire company is hysteria. Explain the situation to YOUR manager using the facts and the facts only and forget about the case – shits happen. Also ask your manager if he wants you to send a response to the other managers involved in the case from Lars. And Lars also needs to learn that there is subordination in the company.
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
He didn't CC the entire company, thankfully, 'only' my colleagues in the tech-department. I've taken some time - a few weeks - to contemplate the episode, and I'm somewhat weary of taking it up with my boss now that time has passed. I should've reacted sooner, but I was kinda shocked and missed my opportunity. The more I hear from you guys, though, the more I'm convinced there's a valid case for a calm reply such as the one suggested by Mark (and thanks for that!). Thanks for your 2 cents, appreciate it.
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