Manager threatened to fire a colleague, then gave them a critical task – which they flubbed

Nobody noticed for years, at which point the boss realized they had to cover up their poor decision

Welcome to Monday morning, an occasion The Register marks with a new instalment of "Who, Me?" It's our reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace mistakes and share your escapes from subsequent scrapes.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Gordon" who told us he once worked as an engineer at a major semiconductor corporation.

Gordon rose to become manager of an engineering team which worked on a very popular PC chipset. One of the chaps on this team wasn't pulling his weight, so Gordon got the job of telling him to improve, or leave.

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"In all fairness, he was a nice guy but not a great engineer and needed to be better," Gordon told The Register.

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Not long after that moment of managerial unpleasantness, Gordon's team got the job of doing a full backup of the chipset's "production stepping" – the silicon equivalent of a minor point release. The idea was to create a detailed record that could be used as a restore point.

"This was not a nightly backup, but a purposeful backup to retain a snapshot of the entire cleaned-up design database for future cases where we might need to spin another stepping quickly," Gordon explained.

Gordon told his underperforming colleague to do the backup. "Because I was overworked, I did not think this through," he told The Register.

The at-risk worker quickly proved why he was under the pump by deciding the backup wasn't necessary until the team completed the next stepping – but didn't tell anyone about that plan.

Before that next stepping was done, the employee's past indiscretions caught up with him and he was let go.

The story now fast-forwards six years, to a moment when Gordon learned that a customer wanted to buy the old chipset design so they could make a radiation-hardened version to use on satellites.

The major semiconductor company liked the sound of that, and asked Gordon to find the backup.

"My colleague and I then pieced together what had happened," he wrote. "Being good engineers, we said nothing. We searched through old nightly backup tapes until we found bits and pieces of different steppings of the design database and copied them all to one place, then handed this off to the customer."

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To this day, Gordon doesn't know if the customer was able to produce a useful chip from the bits of backup he cobbled together.

"Did they realize they received bits and pieces of two slightly different databases? Did they care? Was the project canceled before anyone realized it?"

"From then on, I was more careful about who I assigned the task of creating restore backups for each design project," he told The Register. "And I kept a record of the emails requesting backups and confirmation that backups had been done."

Have you given a job to the wrong person? Or given clients slightly dodgy data? In either case, click here to send email to Who, Me? We would love to tell your tale on a future Monday. ®