My background is safety-critical and -- speaking from first-hand experience -- it was truly incredible how much push-back we'd get when raising safety issues.

System tick timer rolled over after 2^32 1ms clock ticks (a little over seven weeks) and the software mishandled it by rebooting and losing control of the process. It wasn't until QA got involved (it turned out they saw it on a long-term test) that we were cleared to actually fix it. It was a two-character change in an inline function!

In some places "cover it up, don't discuss it in email" is the natural response. It really depends on the management and the organisational culture. You can have management who support the engineering team, or you can have management who micromanage and overrule and end up turning a two-day hotfix cycle into ten months of "try soldering a resistor to every single pin on the PCB".

You might be surprised, but if you move to Europe, it is actually so! Move to Berlin of Frankfurt. There is always work for Software Developer here, it is hard not to get one and you get spammed by recruiters all the time. You don't have to take shit from management, you can just go elsewhere. Everything is also very near.

> Quitting assumes the possibility of finding a job around the corner and not having people that depend on you.

Quitting assumes the possibility of finding a job after spending 4 months doing leetcode 6 hours a day and not having people that depend on you.

Yep, and the same can be said for “real engineers”. Most EEs, civil engineers, etc work on boring stuff as well with negligible risk of doing any harm.

Exactly. It's not like somebody just did this like in a three people startup. There are code reviews and quality management and many more, and this lousy "fix" has passed all those stages and instances. If nobody declined this, there's a serious problem within Cisco.