In today’s story, we learn about another boss who is a horrible boss.

This boss takes credit for an employee’s work, but eventually, he’s forced to admit he has been lying.

Let’s see how the story escalates…

All circuits are down!

Back in the 80’s I worked for a custom printed circuit board shop that specialized in 24 or 48 hour deadlines to ship if you paid heavily for it.

Boards with circuits on both sides were the cheapest and easiest to get done on time.

We made boards up to 17 layers, and each layer you added increased the chances of something going wrong with the board.

The boards would shrink slightly, drilling holes would be misaligned, circuit traces would have flaws on them, solder points wouldn’t print in the exact spot needed and other issues.

He describes the workflow process…

I worked at the first stage of manufacturing, just after the engineers who got the artwork for the job and decided on the materials to be used and the specs of the board.

I would drill the holes in a test panel then have an inspector examine the holes to make sure they were all drilled in the right place and with the right size drill bit.

On a multi-layer board this could take a couple hours to get right, then we’d send the job to be manufactured.

Frequently we’d have jobs sent back for defects, we’d adjust the artwork or where the holes drilled to correct for the material shrinking or warping and send the job through again.

The most expensive job I worked on was for about $850,000 dollars for a 17 layer board, they wanted two, all the circuits were gold plated and they needed it in two days.

He greatly improved the process.

After I had been there five months, I wrote a program in QuickBasic on my own time that would take our reject rate at first certification from 80% down to 5% after inputting the dimensions and specs of the board.

This saved us from two to eight hours per job.

After tweaking it for a couple more months I reduced the reject rate from warping down from 45% to 3% on most jobs.

This made a huge impact on the company in terms of delivery and profit.

When my boss told the head of IT what I had written he asked to get a copy and see how well it worked.

The boss took credit for his work.

What I didn’t know was that he would use a HEX code editor on my compiled program to change my name to display his when the program started.

He went to the company’s owner and showed off what “he” wrote and got a huge raise, a very generous bonus and promotion.

I got quietly told to shut up, I’d be rewarded too.

My reward wasn’t more money, it was that I got to come in and leave an hour early on second shift.

Since it was my word against his, and my boss didn’t have the clout to back me up, I left the company.

The program wanted you to wish it a “happy birthday.”

Now onto the revenge.

I wrote the program so that every year, on the page where it would ask for the job ID number, a message would appear at the bottom stating “We request that you wish the author of this program a most happy birthday”.

If they typed in “happy birthday” the program would continue for another year.

If they didn’t, it would remove my name from a text file on the company share listing everyone’s birthday.

The program would check for my name every time it ran, and if it went missing it would report an error message I made up that sounded bad… “Binary Coding Stack Overflow error, input invalid”.

Everything came crashing down after OP’s birthday.

The day after my birthday, my old boss called me to see if I had a copy still because his stopped working.

The entire system was shut down while people tried to remember how to setup a job manually.

All contracts they had for quick turnaround were late that month and the sales department had to stop taking new quick orders.

The owner demanded the head of IT fix it and get them back up and running.

He finally had to admit that he didn’t write it and had no idea how to program.

The company imploded.

He was fired on the spot.

They lost so much money in the next couple months that the owner had to sell the company.

Most of the employees transitioned to the new company with a little lower pay, but with less stress and better benefits.

The former head of IT ended up starting his own company, tutoring math to grade schoolers.

I feel bad for the company owner who had no idea the boss didn’t really write the code.

He lost his company, and he didn’t do anything wrong except for hiring someone dishonest.

Let’s see how Reddit responded…

This reader thinks he should’ve offered to fix the program…for a price.

Another reader agrees that he could’ve made a lot of money offering to fix the program.

This reader shares the lesson from this story.

Another person thinks the revenge was good but possibly the aim was off.

This person loved the revenge.

I still think it was a little extreme to destroy the entire company.

But hey, sometimes we’re just that mad.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.