Should I tell a departed coworker about their "sev 1" defect?

Posted by noahz on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by noahz
Published on 2012-06-12T14:55:32Z Indexed on 2012/06/12 16:48 UTC
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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?

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