Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn
- ID
- 12600
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 10 Aug 2026, 2:30 PM
- Fetched
- 10 Aug 2026, 3:05 PM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/10/demoralized-developers-desperate-hack-came-back-to-haunt-him-on-linkedin/5284476
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 2.0
- Created
- 10 Aug 2026, 3:05 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
A developer facing low morale after layoffs symlinked /usr/bin/python3 to /usr/bin/python2 to avoid a proper Python 2-to-3 migration, and it silently worked well enough that nobody noticed. The shortcut was later discovered and surfaced on LinkedIn, turning a desperate hack into an embarrassing career moment.
Why it matters
A fun cautionary tale, but there's no actionable takeaway for builders beyond the obvious: symlink-aliasing one runtime to another to skip a migration is technical debt that will eventually surface publicly. Not worth changing any decision over.
Discussion angle
Where's the line between pragmatic shortcuts and hacks that will haunt you — and would this Python 2/3 symlink trick even work on most real codebases, or did Walter get lucky with trivial scripts?