Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

It&#x27;s more likely it&#x27;ll work out like how a situation recently worked out at my employer. We had an employee that was too impatient to set up an internal AWS resource using the more time-consuming channels, so he set it up in our hack-stuff AWS account under his own user account. Our teams found it useful, and began to rely on it. He got laid off. Ops deleted all his user-related stuff, including accidentally deleting the tech he wrote that we found useful. They were unable to restore it, and it broke our CI&#x2F;CD and caused a bunch of problems.<p>So yeah, if you want to delete something that you voluntarily wrote, all you have to do is wait.

IANAL, but &quot;would it be legal for me to delete...&quot; is the completely wrong approach here. Instead...<p>- You were an hourly warehouse flunky, not any sort of professional programmer. While doing your warehouse job, you cobbled together a mish-mash of software stuff, on company computers, to try to make your job easier. With you there to fiddle and debug and update as needed, that worked pretty darn well.<p>- Now, you are leaving. Your layman&#x27;s understanding is that the company legally owns all the software you made...<i>as is</i>. There ain&#x27;t no &quot;You Programming, Inc.&quot; in this situation, for your old employer to have any documentation, nor warranty, nor support contract from.<p>- Your suggestion is that the company delete the software, and revert to the previous procedures - which worked perfectly well. If it seemed worthwhile, a professional programming company - which <i>could</i> offer documentation, warranties, support, etc. - could probably duplicate the features of your stuff pretty quickly.<p>The goal being to convince the management of Warehouse, Inc. to order the deletion of your software from the company&#x27;s computers.

Unlikely to be legal - you aren&#x27;t authorized to delete software in use on company computers (regardless of whether management <i>currently knows</i> it is in use), and the software you wrote is likely a &quot;work for hire&quot; done during work hours in the course of your duties (again, regardless of whether management <i>currently knows</i> about the software and how it gets used by front-line workers).<p>The correct way to handle this is to get ahold of the CTO or a relevant subordinate in their department, and inform them of the shadow-IT situation going on at the warehouse. Most risk-adverse IT executives would have a conniption at the idea that work policies are enacted by business logic code that zero employees understand and can modify.

I saw something that was sort of the inverse of this. A teammate quit with zero notice in a 3 AM email. In that email, he indicated he&#x27;d made the decision to open source all the code that he had written in his last year or so with the company. It was in a public github repo in his personal account. The company had a lot of open source, but this was never expected to be part of that.<p>We were able to get it taken down and no other action was taken against him, but it was an interesting move on his part. His motivation didn&#x27;t seem to be bad blood - he continued pleasant interactions with several of us, including those in his management chain, long after leaving.

There are a lot of comments saying that the situation is clear-cut and the guy is commiting a crime. But that&#x27;s BS, this situation isn&#x27;t a normal situation at all. Also, intent matters. If I delete some old code that I think I no longer need, to free up space or even to get my home directory into an OCD state, I&#x27;m not liable for destruction of company property even if I accidentally got rid of something that might have been useful. In fact, it could be argued that when leaving a workplace you should maybe make sure that you don&#x27;t leave behind any customer data that should be deleted.

Just leave it. It could lead to a contract for you down the line. Or kudos. Or, nothing, but you&#x27;ve made coworkers&#x27; lives a little bit easier. I doubt there would be legal consequence for deleting it, unless the company were feeling vindictive, but if they are, now you have a headache for no good reason.<p>I do say &quot;you&quot; here, not knowing if the stackexchange poster <i>zelembia</i> is <i>azeemba</i>, nor if OP will otherwise ever see this. Some posts are like a message in a bottle, flung heedlessly into the ocean of the internet. Or like forgotten software, left to decay on an aging computer in the backroom of a warehouse. But it still must be written.

My gut says, for this sort of thing: why delete it? Let them have it, there’s no upside to deleting it. Who cares, right?<p>But hypothetically, it probably has no license or anything like that. Not even the “no promises of merchantability” stuff you sometimes see. Hypothetically could there be a risk to the coder? If my buggy “forklift stacking high” software says “stack that stuff up to the roof,” and gets hurt listening to it, am I on the hook? (In that case of course he never should have let anybody use it in the first place, but leaving the job provides a moment of reflection).<p>Realistically it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing anybody would pursue. But it is interesting to wonder about…

There&#x27;s a lot of answers stating that if the code was written by an employee during work hours, it&#x27;s automatically owned by the company. Is that true? My understanding is the author would still retain copyright unless they&#x27;ve already entered into an agreement with their employer that anything they build during work hours is owned by the company. That kind of thing is pretty standard in employment agreements for software engineers, but for warehouse workers?

Personally, I don&#x27;t see this situation as being that different than how people might make jigs, modify tools, make checklists, etc. to make their job easier&#x2F;more efficient&#x2F;safer.<p>Live and let live, knowing that you were intelligent enough to solve a problem where others couldn&#x27;t. That&#x27;s a skill that is transferrable and that can&#x27;t be destroyed.

If you want to do this because you&#x27;re pissed at the company and want to screw them over, don&#x27;t ...... the best thing you can do is to leave, and leave them with this piece of software that no one understands and no one supports, eventually it will become a mill-stone around their necks, trust me ... that&#x27;s the best revenge

The top comment is interesting:<p>&gt; If you wrote this software during your working time (nine to five), and were paid for that time, then the company owns the software.<p>I don&#x27;t live in the US, but copyright laws are quite homogeneous world wide. But I do have the impression that copyright is kept as long as it is not signed over.<p>given that the person did logistics without an employment contract, he could notice the company that he retracts all rights to use the software wrote.<p>Of cause that would cause havoc to the company, and they could probably counter sue that he did something incurring the liability that he was never asked to.

My best take would be to offer to sell it to them. If they say &quot;sure&quot;, great, however if they say &quot;no, we already own this&quot; so be it.

My opinion is that deleting the thing is a very dangerous move.<p>But it depends, if it is running on your own work computer&#x2F;session, and it is like cleaning up you data when leaving might be ok.<p>As a real answer, we would need to know what are the terms of the contract of this person.<p>His job description should be clearly stated inside and we would know if there is a kind of right&#x2F; copyright assignment to the company.<p>If it is not the case, and it was not in his job description , it is easy to argue that the employee legally kept the copy right and rights on the software.<p>So he could legally tell the employer that it is not allowed to use the software except buying it.<p>The only gray area is if it was done during work hours with the employer willing fully agreed to have the employee spend some time working on that.

I wonder if there are any actual legal liabilities opened up by companies for touting &quot;ownership this, ownership that&quot; regarding engineers owning their code, when they obviously don&#x27;t actually want that.

Unsupported software slowly fades away, just add more hoops and permissions !! Also check where it is hosted !

All they probably have to do is tell their IT department about the unsecured system they apparently still have access to. They&#x27;ll likely do the most straight forward fix and shut it off.

Better sell them maintenance.