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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

"Why do we need a Security Director? Our security is fine, there's no problem, so why spend the money?"

There's this weird dynamic in Information technology where professionals doing their jobs really well result in there being no problems. When there is no problems there's not much attention and the lack of problems is devalued by management.

Management value teams and managers who heroically solve big problems and issues.

This is why companies can sometimes decide that their best people are not needed cause "all is so quiet" and fire them.

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This is where having someone on the executive team with technical experience can be such a boon. I know I'm lucky with this, but our exec (chief admin. officer) spent years in the IS ('s' is for services) department at our company -- starting as a VB dev back in the 80s. Luckily leadership is fairly forward-thinking for a nonprofit and we've been doing Angular and C# for years now. She consistently goes to bat for our director and has managed to get our CEO to understand the great difficulty involved in keeping an IS operation running smoothly.

I mean, think about it. Hospitals wouldn't fire the surgeons for consistently executing error-free operations.

When I worked at Discovery Channel I remember a call where the CEO admitted they have no idea what they're doing with regards to tech. Made my decision to leave seem smart looking back now that they've shut down Rev 3 (where I worked for a while) and the other division doing R&D. Was pretty frustrating to build stuff that would never see the light of day.

TLDR; execs that know something about tech is super important.

Kind of like how everybody thinks Y2K was a zeroburger because nothing catastrophic happened.

I have no insight here, but given the NYT isn’t completely ignorant about technology, conspiratorially I might think it could be a way to push someone they didn’t want anymore out —we eliminated the position! (And we just created a new chief of “cyber” position, it’s totally different).

You always eliminate the position so you don't have to pay severance, oldest trick in the book.

What is severances for if not for redundant positions

Stop! It’s a re-structuring, not abandoning of infosec. This was one person out of many. Still sucks, but should be seen within context

Management value teams and managers who engineer huge problems, blame them on someone else, and then pretend to heroically solve big problems and issues.

This doesn't just apply to engineering fields either :D

An odd corollary of this is how being kind of bad can cause massive problems that get the attention of high level people and lots of focus. If you can then fix, or help fix, the problems and dodge blame, it's really quite positive as you get to know the high level people you'll be able to leverage for promotion and career advancement.

You are assuming that NYT doesn't care about security, whereas this might be as simple as this particular lady being fired. As others said, her boss and other information security people are still working there.

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