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Comment by propellerhat | Hacker News Reader

My opinion: This person used someone else's electronic credentials to perform a task without asking for permission. This person did not have the proper level of access on their own account to perform this action, so they used someone else's (likely the "VP" who they were working with on that project). This would/should get you fired at many places.

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Not sure what the down voting is about. Things that lead me to this conclusion: "...and remind you that this is the hacker company. Of course this is all a lie: that's how you get fired." And "It was clear that the person who talked to me had no idea what she was talking about. She quickly confessed as much to me." The author is referring to the HR member who was conducting the investigation. It was probably a technical task that the author of the article performed with someone else's creds or by bypassing some security system (checking in code, deploying code to prod., etc.) which is why the HR member "had no idea what she was talking about [and] quickly confessed to [the author] as much." The HR team was highly interested in finding out "...whether somebody had asked me to do it" and "...if you were not sure of what you were doing, why didn't you ask your manager?" HR wanted to know if the anonymous author had permission to perform the task since the anonymous author's account did not have the appropriate permissions to do so. "If a week prior, I had typed a few different keystrokes, I would never have been in that room."

Also, I forgot this relevant quote: "Yes I did it, and nobody made me. I was working on a special project with a VP at that time, and he had nothing to do with it."

This person used someone else's electronic credentials to perform a task without asking for permission. [...] This would/should get you fired at many places.

You mean that thing that happens all the time at every office?

I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me, specifically because he was sick of my asking whenever I needed to be granted access to new things. I can't think of a single job I've that involved computers where I wasn't given access to user accounts that were not mine for reasons of expediency in the face of inflexable permissions systems.

Which company do you work for?

I would imagine at a place the scale of Facebook, where logging and accountability trails are as important as they must be at Facebook, this kind of transgression is categorically different from the one you describe.

>I have a post-it note on which my boss wrote his password for me,

thus it means explicit (and in writing! - good for you :) approval by the boss, and the boss bears primary responsibility here. In case of the original article it is pretty clear that the author didn't bother to get at least even informal approval from the higher-ups (even just mentioning that he is going to perform the task in that specific way in a conversation with that VP would go a long way) - that is a basic skill(or even i'd say "instinct") of covering your own lower behind one has to apply while working at a BigCo, be it Facebook or IBM.

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