What are some mistakes you can make as a programmer that will get you fired immediately?
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I am a Mainframe Programmer. 3 years back I was working for an American Express and I was working on a remediation team. My job was to fix a coding glitch in case the promotion is not awarding bonus to customers properly and then award manual bonus to all the people who did not get the bonus due to the issue.
To summarize it, I had power to give points/cashback/gift cards to anyone who is the member of AmEx.
One fine day, there was an issue with a particular promotion. many people have complained that they are not getting 15% cashback they are entitled to under a certain program. Issue was assigned to me. I looked at the code in the back-end, fixed the issue in an instant and promotion was back to normal.
Now second part was manually giving bonus to all those who were denied bonus wrongfully. This is where it began. I fixed that issue on 6th of October, so from 6th of October everything was fine. BUT, while awarding bonuses, I don’t know how, but I considered 6th October file AGAIN. I completed my work, packed my bag, went home, had dinner and slept.
At 2AM in the night, my phone rang. It was my boss. Following is the conversation.
Boss : I don’t care where you are, just come to the office RIGHT NOW!!!!!!
Me: What happened?
Boss : We will discuss when you come here.
I was in office exactly after 1 hour 40 minutes.
What happened was, all the people who transacted under that particular promotion were awarded 15% cashback rightfully because the promotion was fixed, and again some angel sitting in Mumbai called Rohan Sangodkar awarded them another 15%, so in total, 30%.
Thousands’ of dollars were awarded extra that day and due to AmEx policy, those could not be reverted.
I was not fired that day, but grilled incessantly.
P.S. In retrospect when I was making the report of over-bonus, I came across one account of a lady/gentleman who did a wedding shopping of more that $10K. Out of which they got $3K as a cashback. So if you are reading this, hope you liked your wedding gift. 
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Email source coDe to your personal email to get fired the same day ;:D
these cases are common for startups, I was working in a startup and have seen all these type of frauds happening there due to loopholes.
A programmer is almost never involved in operations activity like this. They NEVER deal with real production customer data. So either this is a fiction or a story of a BPO employee.
Also, there are multiple levels of reviewers and approvers who double or triple cross before committing such financial transactions.
So whole chain would have been fired (if this is not a fiction which I suspect 99.99℅
)