Imagine working for a company on a contract position. When the contract ends, if you liked the company well enough, would you keep working there and try to renew the contract, or would you happily move on to an adventure at another company?

In today’s story, one software developer decided to move on to another company after his contract at the previous company ended, and his previous employer was not happy about it.

Let’s see what happened.

IP for Free

Many moons ago, I was a developer working in my first job, in a small software company.

I had a 1-year contract and was developing an administrative system to process equipment tests and test results. I wrote it for the software company I worked for, who developed it bespoke for a customer.

It was a long time ago, and almost all software was custom-made at that time.

The customer was nice and had a good IT officer on-site that could also develop, but had no time to do so, and certainly not from scratch.

When the contract ended, OP moved on.

When the end of my contract was coming near and the software was running, I tried to negotiate new terms but without an interesting offer.

The job market was not good at that time, living was cheap in that area, and I guess they just assumed I would stay.

I found however something else as I was young and did not really care about anything else than cool assignments with new technology.

So, at the last day, I shook hands and wished them the best.

The company was NOT happy.

That did not fall well.

They wanted me to stay, demanded me to stay, but under local law, walking in the next day meant accepting a contract with all attached obligations like a non-competition agreement, 8 weeks notice etc etc.

I walked out and a week later I got a threatening letter from their lawyer about abandoning post, misleading them, caused financial losses.

Whilst I assumed they had little on me, even a little problem is a big one if you do not have money and quick access to legal support.

OP talked to a lawyer.

They wanted me to fix issues on the bespoke system as the customer made some tickets that no one could resolve.

But I already started a new job. I did not have the source code anymore, no libraries etc.

Cue MC

I found a lawyer, who basically said: go and do it, commit to nothing, and this way you showed your good will. That is enough in this jurisdiction.

He did what his former employer hoped he would do.

I went to the software company to get the sources and libraries that I needed to work on the software.

I informed them that I would go to the customer site to use as I needed their hardware and installation to see their issues on-prem & fix them right there, so the customer could sign-off and provide absolution.

The software company agreed and was probably proud of pressuring me into working for them for free, as a punishment for my betrayal.

I went to the customer site, sat with the IT officer in order to set up a dev and test environment, copied the source code, libraries, documentation and digged into my code.

At the end of the day, the issue list was addressed.

Here’s how it played out.

Before closing down, I explained that I needed to delete the source code when ready but that I was hungry and wanted to grab a bite, and that they should continue testing, just to be sure.

When I came back, the tests were successful.

I deleted all source code etc, made pictures of what I did and emailed the report.

In parallel, the IT officer was labeling a portable drive and I saw a finished backup job on his monitor.

The customer never made a ticket anymore and did not extend their maintenance & support contract.

What did Reddit think of this guy’s actions?

Let’s read the comments.

This person is a little confused.

Another person explained how OP was being malicious.

Here’s another similar explanation.

This person is thinking of “The Simpsons.” Get it?

Asking someone to work for free could really backfire.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.