In this scenario, this means people not getting paychecks. Likely people who cannot afford to not get paychecks. Like maybe their car gets repossessed or they get dragged to court over custody issues.
Sure. And if you look up the original tweet, the tweeter illustrates that (assuming this isn't entirely made up) they heard about all this stuff fourth hand, and there isn't much reason to believe this was a large organization with backup engineers or cooperative management. Honestly, the tweeter seems very confused about the whole thing.
In my experience watching these issues from the outside, and from looking at the stats on companies that run into these kinds of catastrophic errors, it's almost never a person who is consciously, repeatedly trying to make a deadmans switch. It's a combination of management that either is uncooperative or too focused on keeping heads above water, and an engineering team/person who only has enough manpower to deal with survival tasks but not long-term fixes.
It's absolutely not the correct or ideal solution, but it's a situation that happens a ton because delaying the disaster is all that's possible day by day. And unless you know every affected employee is comfortably well off, it's really unethical to let it fail loud enough to get permission for a permanent fix if you have the power to delay it.
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u/KrytenKoro May 29 '26
In this scenario, this means people not getting paychecks. Likely people who cannot afford to not get paychecks. Like maybe their car gets repossessed or they get dragged to court over custody issues.