If capitalism insists on those higher up getting exorbitantly more money than those doing the work, then we have to hold them to the other thing they claim they believe in: that those higher up also deserve all the blame.

It's a novel concept, I know. Leave the Nobels by the doormat, please.

Git Blame exists for a reason, and that's to find the engineer who pushed the bad commit so everyone can work together to fix it.

Blame the Project manager/Middle manager/C-Level exec/Unaware CEO/Greedy Shareholders who allowed for a CI/CD process that doesn't allow ample time to test and validate changes.

Software needs a union. This shit is getting out of control.

"George Kurtz, the CEO of CrowdStrike, used to be a CTO at McAfee, back in 2010 when McAfee had a similar global outage. "

I do wonder how frequent it is that an individual developer will raise an important issue and be told by management it's not an issue.

I know of at least one time when that's happened to me. And other times where it's just common knowledge that the central bureaucracy is so viscous that there's no chance of getting such-and-such important thing addressed within the next 15 years is unlikely. And so no one even bothers to raise the issue.

If you don't test an update before you push it out, you fucked up. Simple as that. The person or persons who decided to send that update out untested, absolutely fucked up. They not only pushed it out untested, they didn't even roll it out in offset times from one region to the next or anything. They just went full ham. Absolutely an idiot move.

Wild theory: could it have been malicious compliance? Maybe the dev got a written notice to do it that way from some incompetent manager.

If I'm responsible for the outcome of the business, I want a fair share of the profits of the business.

I get that it's not the point of the article or really an argument being made but this annoys me:

We could blame United or Delta that decided to run EDR software on a machine that was supposed to display flight details at a check-in counter. Sure, it makes sense to run EDR on a mission-critical machine, but on a dumb display of information?

I mean yea that's like running EDR on your HVAC controllers. Oh no, what's a hacker going to do, turn off the AC? Try asking Target about that one.

You've got displays showing live data and I haven't seen an army of staff running USB drives to every TV when a flight gets delayed. Those displays have at least some connection into your network, and an unlocked door doesn't care who it lets in. Sure you can firewall off those machines to only what they need, unless your firewall has a 0-day that lets them bypass it, or the system they pull data from does. Or maybe they just hijack all the displays to show porn for a laugh, or falsified gate and time info to cause chaos for the staff.

Security works in layers because, as clearly shown in this incident, individual systems and people are fallible. "It's not like I need to secure this" is the attitude that leads to things like our joke of an IoT ecosystem. And to why things like CrowdStrike are even made in the first place.

As a counterpoint to this articles counterpoint, yes, engineers should still be held responsible, as well as management and the systems that support negligent engineering decisions.

When they bring up structural engineers and anesthesiologists getting "blame" for a failure, when catastrophic failures occur, it's never blaming a single person but investigating the root cause of failures. Software engineers should be held to standards and the managers above them pressuring unsafe and rapid changes should also be held responsible.

Education for engineers include classes like ethics and at least at my school, graduating engineers take oaths to uphold integrity, standards, and obligations to humanity. For a long time, software engineering has been used for integral human and societal tools and systems, if a fuck up costs human lives, then the entire field needs to be reevaluated and held to that standard and responsibility.

CTOs that outsourced to a software they couldn't and didn't auidit are to blame first. Not having a testing pipeline for updates is to blame. Windows having a verification system loophole is too blame. Crowd strike not testing this patch are too blame. Them building a system to circumvent inspect by MS is their fault.

Now with each org there is probably some distribution of blame too, but the execs in charge are first and for most in charge...

Honestly this is probably enough serious damages in some cases that I suspect ever org to have pay some liability for the harms their negligence caused. If our system is just that is, and if it is not than we have a duty to correct that as well