Should I tell a departed coworker about their "sev 1" defect?
- by noahz
I had a co-worker leave our company recently. Before leaving, he coded a component that had a severe memory leak that caused a production outage (OutOfMemoryError in Java). The problem was essentially a HashMap that grew and never removed entries, and the solution was to replace the HashMap with a cache implementation.
From a professional standpoint, I feel that I should let him know about the defect so he can learn from the error. On the other hand, once people leave a company, they often don't want to hear about legacy projects that they have left behind for bigger and better things.
What is the general protocol for this sort of situation?