Like some people have pointed out it&#x27;s not uncommon to do so when privileged employees are fired, a rogue sysadmin can bring the organization down to it&#x27;s knees out of spite and if they even remotely capable do so with sufficient plausible deniability to avoid prosecution.<p>The lack of an exit interview is odd, but not uncommon in many cases especially in smaller companies where your direct supervisor or line manager is not your &quot;technical&quot; supervisor so the exit interview is pretty much pointless.
Small organizations also tend to be less compartmentalized and they assume that knowledge transfer is unnecessary which might be the case in some cases and really not the case in others.<p>If he wasn&#x27;t fired for gross misconduct and actually made redundant even in the UK severance is often paid, heck severance is paid even in cases where it&#x27;s not warranted because employers rather to settle right away than face a unwarranted termination law suit (if you are officially made redundant there is statutory redundancy pay which employers very often increase considerably ex-gratia which is also tax exempt in the UK), the lack of notice can also point to the fact that this might not have been such a clear cut case of redundancy because although in some cases employers will just give payment in lieu of notice.<p>Now regarding the case he could&#x27;ve warned them and while he &quot;owed them nothing&quot; anyone with any respect for his work would&#x27;ve done so in such case, a better question would be why would a system which could incur such a hefty payment was setup in the first place and how it was authorized and by whom because. No one in their right mind would go into an agreement that could lead to such fees unless they are utterly incompetent as if the system misbehaved and transferred data excessively or that sysadmin would&#x27;ve gotten sick or otherwise incapacitated the same end result would&#x27;ve occurred.
If the sysadmin was in charge of the setup for this system then he was utterly incompetent for not being able to see a clear business risk regardless if this was just a quick hack that he intended to cancel a week later.
That said the whole ordeal smells funny a 100,000 connection fee for a single monthly usage even at the &quot;dawn of the broadband age&quot; in the UK seems utterly impossible a E1 line would not cost you that a year, so not sure how they could rack that bill over an ISDN30 line (BT Megastream probably).