Initially a weak copy protection system in the 1980s Apple classic Mac OS, the term "flipping the bozo bit" was later reused to describe a decision to ignore a person's input.
It is a whimsical term, possibly derived from the classic children's comedy character, Bozo the Clown.
In early versions of Apple's classic Mac OS, the "bozo bit" (also called the "no copy" flag in some documentation) was one of the flags in the Finder Information Record, which described various file attributes.
In his 1995 book Dynamics of Software Development,[5] which presented a series of rules about the political and interpersonal forces that drive software development, Jim McCarthy applied the bozo bit notion to the realm of human interaction.
But by taking that lazy way out, the person poisons team interactions and cannot avail themselves of help from the "bozo" ever again.