Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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> She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.

I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way.

What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.

The missing piece of the puzzle is that we never meet the idiot manager in the story. She's in an organizational situation where her team has oversight over a team in the government implementing on a project but does not have the ability to directly set policy, constrain goals, or otherwise apply direct managerial leverage. The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised. Matt Cutts, meanwhile, is the head of her department, and also has no managerial oversight over the team she just called federal law enforcement on.

Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).

> The idiot in the story is the guy charging full speed ahead with a deployment of a product that is already known compromised.

Ah. That makes sense.

...the team she just called federal law enforcement on.

That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.

It's not precisely that she called law enforcement on them, poor choice of words on my part. It's more that, if you will, she turned the "eye of Sauron" on the project. If the team she had oversight on thought they were going to meet deadlines with open security holes, having the FBI actively looking at what they're doing pretty much torpedoes that hope.

It seems like the team wanted it torpedoed as well. Every higher up was aware but tied in bureaucracy. The team basically washed their hands and tried to deliver in order to pass the buck. Messing with things codified in federal law seems like a very poor career choice.

She’s probably holding back for various reasons, despite the sensational title. You have to read between the lines.

Holding back? She names her employer and her boss yet doesn’t give anything concrete, but feels okay to call him an “idiot” in the title?

She never actually outright called her boss an idiot. The most literal interpretation of the title is "if you feel this way about your boss, then here is why you may feel that way." I certainly hope that was her intended meaning, because the counterfactual is very risque. I did think the title was unnecessary though, and the naming.

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