ass hole.
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®®
There, now everyone stop using ®. It belongs to me now. 
®®® (Just to be on the safe side.)
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Too often. It also points to a problem with some managers who – with the goal to not appear detached, ineffectual, and weak – ignore employees’ profit-maximizing tactics, thus giving the impression that all is okay. Then you have Management (note the capitalization) who also turn the big blind eye when supporting a ‘cost plus’ project. (Gee. How do I know this.)
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For all we know, it wasnt his first time doing this, just his first time getting caught. Given how unregulated the industry is, I doubt theyll dig very deep.
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True. I thought that as well, and that it may not be limited to him. I guess we will (or won’t) see what happens next.
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In any event he was caught on CCTV doing something close to where the damage was done, when it was done, without documentation saying what he was doing. You’d think he would know about the cameras.
I see a lot of time wasting/job preservation in software, and it happens all the way through the stack. Usually its managers and senior devs choosing architectures which are certain to cause lucrative maintenance issues down the track.
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This book was and is a ripping read on perverse outcomes https://www.amazon.com/Sabotage-American-Workplace-Anecdotes-Dissatisfaction/dp/0962709131
so glad this didn’t go worse, phew
guess his career as mechanic is done, he can always take up another profession like being a surgeon or a firefighter… 
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While American Airlines seems unlikely to get any additional scrutiny as a result of this case, I do have to wonder how well they are treating their maintance staff.
I know that if I get into a metal tube like that one, I want the pilot to feel good about his job, to be well rested, and I want him to be as invested as I am in a safe landing. Nothing less seems safe to me, no matter what the ticket cost. Same stands true for the support staff. If they find it cheaper to export the work to places where the manuals need translating, they damn well better translate the manuals. I have very little faith right now that those profits are being safely spent.
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For some reason, I am reminded of the policy at Biman Bangladesh airlines of randomly picking one member of the maintenance crew who had just worked on a plane to fly on it.
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Well, I do know from my days as a construction site manager1), talking to old hands, that “in the old days” (which would have been sometime before the mid-1980ies) it wasn’t that uncommon for a splash or two of diesel to find its way into the asphalt mixture. Apparently this makes the asphalt mixture a bit smoother and easier to pour and spread.
Mind you, we’re talking about asphalt used for whole road sections, not filling potholes, and times when much more was done by hand. Modern asphalt lorries and machines for pouring, spreading and grading keep the asphalt mix at an optimal temperature. Lukewarm asphalt is a royal pain to work with, and won’t stick properly. Blowtorches only help a bit.
And if the ground is too cold, nothing really works as intended.
The asphalt mixes for fixing potholes are only meant to last for a short time, i.e. until the next summer when you fix the pothole properly. Which means replacing at least a large-ish section of the topping around the pothole including digging up the pothole and repairing the gravel bed (or whatever the structure under the asphalt layers is made of). (I know, I know - theory vs real life, and all that.)
The mixes used to fix potholes are usually “cold mixtures” dumped into a hole, without fixing the issues that made the hole appear in the first place, usually without at least cleaning the hole, in sub-optional weather conditions, in a hurry. No need for any additional skullduggery to fuck up the fix, really. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen; construction gangs have a lot of their own myths, legends and superstitions.
1) My mind didn’t have the translation at hand, so I looked it up. Apparently a British term is clerk of the works, which has a nice Victorian ring about it, I think. The really pretentious term I once found is the Latin structorum magister.
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At least this dude was doing this to get some extra hours. This fellow totaled a nuclear submarine so he could knock off early from work.
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I bet it happens in CEO offices a lot.
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tame meme
Oh, the stories I could tell about programmers who wrote overly-complicated code with no comments or documentation. That’s just the tip of the iceberg that ends with backdoors and this one guy who amused himself by periodically sinking a commercial website because he liked getting emergency cries for help. I used to say he had the programmer’s version of Munchausen by proxy.
Most folks like that figured it was a form of job security if no one could figure out what they had done. I spent quite a few years as a contractor cleaning up, clearing up, documenting, and “defusing bombs.” The ability to unravel someone else’s spaghetti allowed me to help a lot of clients who had been squeezed by unethical former employees for years. 
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: On 15 March 2013 Fury was sentenced to over 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in restitution.
Kids, don’t blow your trust fund. You may need it some day.
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You have a compelling perspective, and shared some good information and fun jargon, thanks! Your perspective mostly seems to hinge on the assumption that the severe penalties for and consequences of this kind of behavior would usually serve as an effective deterrent. However, in my mind, that’s a claim that I’m not sure of at all. For example, America has a society where playing the lottery is commonplace, even though it usually doesn’t make much rational sense. If so many people think (or want to think) they might be “special” enough to win the lottery, might they also feel special enough to be likely to get away with something, especially if they are clever about it? For these people, would a deterrent (even a very severe one) really serve as effective persuasion for people who are feeling financial stress or other survival pressures? I wonder if the mechanic (or his analogous counterparts in other fields) are even familiar with the specific penalties for sabotage-based makework.
