Manager Threatened to Fire a Colleague, Then Gave Them a Critical Task - Which They Flubbed
The Register, Monday, November 2nd, 2026
A Register Who, Me? reader recounts assigning a key chipset backup to an underperforming engineer who never did it, discovered six years later.
In The Register's Who, Me? column, a reader called Gordon, an engineering manager at a major semiconductor company, told an underperforming engineer to improve or leave and then assigned him a full backup of a popular PC chipset's production stepping.
The engineer quietly decided the backup was unnecessary until the next stepping and told no one, then was let go before it was done.
Six years later a customer wanted to buy the old design to make a radiation-hardened version for satellites, and Gordon was asked to find the backup.
He and a colleague pieced together what had happened and, saying nothing, began searching for what remained.