So this was a long time ago working for a company that technically doesn't exist anymore, Thompson Reuters. Specifically, the division that I worked in was the stock trading division as a Windows Systems Administrator. They got purchased by Black Rock and changed names to Refinitiv.
I had many daily tasks but one of the long-term projects that was given to me was improving our in-house website that many teams used for wildly different reasons. One of the tools the website had was a page that would generate the trade volumes a client had for whatever time period.
My boss described the problem as, “the page takes forever to generate the table”. And I agree, it was a problem, most queries took well over 3 minutes. I built a new query (the silver bullet) and wrote better web code and now the page loads in under a second. In my efforts I discovered that the company had been charging our clients incorrectly for well over 4 years by adding up trades incorrectly. I'm not an expert in trades, but I know our clients trades were placed into 2 price categories. I don't remember the trade type names, I just remember them as different values in the SQL, and they weren't adding up correctly.
Since I wasn't the person using this tool on a daily basis, I met with the user and learned that 2 categories of trades were being added to the wrong bucket. I relay this information to my manager, he loops in his boss, we all have a meeting. I'm not to breathe a word of this to anyone, this is a big whoopsie.
“Can you change your code to include the previous mistake?”
What. The. Fuck?
“Yeah, I think it shouldn't be very difficult”.
Go back to my desk and I delete ALL the work that I've been doing the past 2 years. Copy the test site over to the live site and commit all changes. Delete all previous copies of site VMs. Wipe all the backups of the site from our mainframe. To be nice, I created a single backup of the test and live VMs. Email the user “Boss wanted me to keep the 3 minute query, I'm quitting”. Print up a single line resignation “After today's date [DATE] I, imaninjayoucantseeme, will no longer be employed with Refinitiv”.
If they really wanted to I suppose they could still recover the old code from tape backups but that sounds like an expensive “fix” for something that isn't broken.