from Hacker News

A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)

by lazyjeff on 6/13/22, 4:08 PM with 140 comments

• by mig39 on 6/13/22, 5:25 PM

  “the individual responsible for this regrettable act is no longer with the company.”

  Technically correct. The best kind of correct.

  They hired him a couple of weeks later.

• by syspec on 6/13/22, 11:54 PM

  The prank cursor, switched the index finger pointer to use the middle finger:

  Which makes the end of the post hilarious:

  > Bonus chatter: A bug was filed in the RAID database to track the problem and its resolution. In the bug, there was some discussion as to how the issue should be classified. Was it an “off-by-one” error? Or maybe it was a “bad pointer”.

• by layer8 on 6/13/22, 7:04 PM

  Apparently the person went on to work on GTA V: https://gtaforums.com/topic/564391-the-pointer-finger-on-the...

• by astrobe_ on 6/13/22, 9:01 PM

  To me, that would certainly be less irritating than the artificially friendly, helpful, engaging tone of the current product.

• by djrockstar1 on 6/13/22, 5:25 PM

  The bonus chatter bit made this worth the read.

• by altacc on 6/13/22, 8:48 PM

  Beware of tests and their data. Long ago the consultancy I worked in took on a tobacco company as a client, which a lot of people didn't like. One of the copy writers testing the CMS used text from an anti-tobacco campaign that was very critical of the client. The content accidently got deployed. Not a happy client!

• by krylon on 6/13/22, 6:28 PM

  Reminds me of a story from "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody where a programmer leaves a playful entry titled "Slayer Sucks Live A Vacuum" in an almost-relase-version of Microsoft Encarta.

  Fortunately, the good people at Microsoft knew that Slayer definitely do not suck, but it was too late to remove the entry, so they had to kind of hide it.

• by croes on 6/14/22, 2:39 AM

  Nothing in the article says he was fired.

  "He then ended his internship and took a two-week break before returning as a full-time employee."

• by leokennis on 6/14/22, 7:16 AM

  On a sidenote, it's pretty amazing that a blog like this is allowed to live on the microsoft.com domain - anyone with experience in mega-enterprises will know how hard it is to do anything remotely reputationally risky and out of the ordinary.

• by AtNightWeCode on 6/13/22, 11:53 PM

  Fun. "It looks you're writing a letter" is more offensive than this though.

• by alexklarjr on 6/13/22, 10:06 PM

  Now he is a VC of windows update and telemetry departments.

• by jmkni on 6/13/22, 6:49 PM

  Why do I feel like the author was the employee in question?

• by ralphc on 6/14/22, 2:25 AM

  At my job in the '80s and '90s we were on a program that got us the source code for Windows. In the Windows 3.0 C code there was a label, and corresponding goto statement, "goto wearefucked;". When we got in the 3.1 code I immediately went to the same spot in the code, but they had changed it. Cowards.

• by janwillemb on 6/15/22, 5:14 AM

  When I was in university, students changed the pointer cursor in Netscape to the off-by-one version. That was around 1995.

• by nsxwolf on 6/13/22, 6:24 PM

  Does this build exist somewhere?

• by indigodaddy on 6/14/22, 2:40 AM

  He never got fired though?

• by Semiapies on 6/14/22, 12:01 AM

  I can't say that I believe this happened, but it's a fun story.

• by duxup on 6/13/22, 11:10 PM

  I was “fired” from a company once.

  Somewhere along the way between two companies who were bad at everything we were given access to our customers intranet to use some tools.

  An internal website that announced new policies once announced that a product now had a 2 year warranty, not 3. Including products already sold.

  Tech support (me) agents were allowed to ask questions via a comment section. So I asked “Is that legal?”

  The CEO (a childish man child) saw this and was horrified to find out someone dared ask… and that person was from some outside contractor.

  One thing lead to another and I was told I was fired for hacking their intranet (CEO didn’t now we had lawful access), but I should still come in the next day anyway. Supposedly the CEOs of both companies were told I was fired (so I was told to keep a low profile ).

  The next day my login was changed to a new name ;). I was a nobody support drone so it wasn’t like anyone would notice.

  And yes it was illegal, lawsuits and much expense was wasted on a dumb policy.

  CEO of our company did jail for unrelated actions. Man child CEO, I don’t know what happened to him, but he was creepy and supposedly had ties to Epstein.

• by jdoliner on 6/13/22, 5:42 PM

  This title is really misleading, they weren't fired at all, maybe they were almost fired. And it was before they started as a full time employee, but it was for something they did while working as an intern.

• by robszumski on 6/13/22, 5:38 PM

  No screenshot!? C'mon.

• by lupire on 6/13/22, 4:33 PM

  Cute story, nicely ambiguous title.

• by joemi on 6/13/22, 6:04 PM

  I'm surprised they hired him after that. If it was a big enough deal that they had to make a statement saying he was no longer with the company, why would they hire him after that?