Code? No.
Physical equipment? Yes

Customer wasn’t happy when we billed them list price for a Cisco switch their MSP tossed out.

My dumb arse used to do this to win 98/me when I was a student. “Optimising” everything and deleting anything I would never use, trying to squeeze every mb out of my limited 2gb disk space but the damn thing was so unreliable I was constantly reinstalling windows.

After one reload, I finished late at night and just left it alone, forgetting to perform all my “power user customisation” until I remembered a week later when it suddenly dawned on me that it was running fast AND stable - I hadn’t had a single crash that week. As a final test, I applied all my “optimisations” again and “oh, look! It’s crashing constantly again”. I was a slow learner and turns out I don’t know better than the people that built the system!

I always think of this when I see threads about win7 - 11 being unstable, because it just isn’t. As you dig through the thread, the op reveals more - they’ve chopped out all sorts of system components with registry hacks and third party tools or blocked updates and then bitch about windows being garbage - don’t get me wrong, they simultaneously make it better and worse with every release so I sympathize why people try chopping out edge, copilot etc - but just don’t.

Disabling services and uninstalling functions the non-hacky way ‘should’ be fine (and likely reversable) but if someone wants to bare-bone their OS or be data gathering-free, they’d be better off learning Linux.

If your customer has write access to a production system, I’m not sure they’re the most irresponsible here.

I write the code: $400 an hour

I write the code and you help me: $800 an hour

You write the code and I help you: $1600 an hour

You write the code: $3200 an hour

“Oh I fixed your code because you did it wrong”

Later:

“Hey the application no longer compiles, I re-wrote a huge chunk of your code and now I don’t know whats wrong”