This is a pretty egregious failure for a staff security engineer

It's a pretty egregious failure for the org because it controlled the conditions for it to happen.

The security guy is just the patsy because he actioned it.

They have obviously done this a million times before and now they got burned.

Yes, this. That same engineer shouldn’t have a pocket nuclear trigger shaped just like their key fob, either. Humans are predictable.

Pretty much the definition of a “career limiting event”

It's either a a Career Limiting Event, or a Career Learning event.

In the case of a Learning event, you keep your job, and take the time to make the environment more resilient to this kind of issue.

In the case of a Limiting event, you lose your job, and get hired somewhere else for significantly better pay, and make the new environment more resilient to this kind of issue.

Hopefully the Wikimedia foundation is the former.

In the average real world, the staff engineer learns nothing, regardless of whether they get to lose or keep their job. Some time down the line, they make other careless mistakes. Eventually they retire, having learned nothing.

This is more common than you'd think.

They'll be fine, recruiters don't look this stuff up and generally background checks only care about illegal shit.

Nobody is going to know who did this, so probably not career limiting in any major way.

They named him in the support ticket linked here somewhere.

> sbassett

[flagged]

Is ok, the AI was going to replace them in a few weeks anyway.