# Manager’s ultimatum preceded engineer’s failure to back up chip design

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/manager-threatened-to-fire-a-colleague-then-gave-them-a-critical-task-which-they-flubbed/
- Published: 2026-11-02T07:30:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-02T07:47:18+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/storage/2026/11/02/manager-threatened-to-fire-a-colleague-then-gave-them-a-critical-task-which-they-flubbed/5306555
- Topics: Software

## Key points

- A critical chipset backup was never completed.
- The gap surfaced six years later for a satellite chip project.
- The manager later documented backup requests and confirmations.

## Summary

An engineering manager later realised that a crucial backup of a semiconductor chipset design had never been made. The lapse came to light six years later, when a customer wanted the old design for a radiation-hardened satellite chip, leaving the manager and a colleague to reconstruct files from incomplete nightly backups.

The manager, identified as Gordon, had assigned the backup to an underperforming engineer shortly after warning him to improve or leave. The engineer decided to wait until the next design revision, but did not tell anyone; he was dismissed before that work was finished. Gordon does not know whether the customer could use the assembled files, and says he later tracked backup requests and confirmations more carefully.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.