Why do departing engineers leave behind broken, half-baked systems?
Engineers often introduce overly complex tools and half-baked platforms into the environment primarily to learn them or pad their resumes before quitting. Once they leave, these fragile implementations become mission-critical to daily operations, leaving the remaining team to deal with broken scripts and emergency fixes.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Rewriting or simplifying infrastructure using basic VMs, Ansible, and standard load balancers
- 2Using alternative simpler orchestration tools like Docker Swarm or HashiCorp Nomad
- 3Refusing to adopt overly complex technologies without a clear scaling justification
- 4enforcing company compliance policies
- 5requiring user stories and UML diagrams for documentation
- 6limiting new tool lifespans to three months before review
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“They inevitably become mission critical to daily operations, the creator leaves, the script breaks, and management dumps the dead body on IT demanding an emergency fix.”source ↗
“Most of the time there's 1 person who's interested in learning it, so they shoehorn it into the environment and let everyone else suffer their sub-par implementation. Then they leave and the next guy inherits it.”source ↗
“We've had two system engineers now set up a half backed kubernetes platform in our environment then leave. They just needed a project to put on their resume.”source ↗
“This is how my entire organization runs from management down to the technical folks and it makes me want to claw my eyes out.”source ↗
“We aren’t, but they’re pushing people to use AI even more. I don’t think anyone is considering the implications”source ↗
“Had my first instance of it a week or two back. A consultant who is preaching AI to everyone but doesn’t understand the companies IT compliance requirements just tells everyone to use AI for everything. So one of the guys, who REALLY should know better and is part of the internal IT security council, vibe codes something with AI in python at home.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How do I take over home tech and cameras when my partner is gone?
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- 3Why do former employees still have active logins?
- 10Why do simple CRM automations get so complicated?
- 27How to fix previous owner DIY nightmares
- 2How do I keep my technical skills sharp while in management?