[throwacide]

Misguided. Circumstances are that he either is or is not qualified for a single point of failure job like that. If not it’s management failure. If the human is “qualified” for a single point of failure responsibility like that, he’s now fired.

[macintux]

I suspect that if your criteria is “you can never make a mistake” that no one is qualified for a single point of failure responsibility.

[baddox]

Clearly some mistakes are bigger than others. Simply counting mistakes is overly simplistic. I’m not suggesting that this single mistake is necessarily big enough to deserve an immediate firing, but there certainly are mistakes that do.

[bilbo0s]

Also, at a more fundamental level...

when you're dealing with processes as critical as this one...

there should be no single point of failure.

Even our President has a backup, a failsafe, and a safeguard for the purposes we're discussing here. And that backup has a backup, a failsafe, and a safeguard. Etc etc etc.

[Feniks]

Not really true. Thanks to advances in technology POTUS had 10 minutes to launch by the 1970s before Washington was toast.

It was an open secret that nuclear retaliation could be instigated without White House or even Pentagon approval if the Soviets tried to decapitate Nato.

[lsc]

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you KEEP IT A SECRET!"

A rational player would only put effort into a retaliatory strike capability to the extent that actually having a retaliatory strike capability strengthened the enemy's perception that they would be obliterated if they struck first.

[throwacide]

So, gross management failure. Or, more likely, a hack. Although I don’t see how they would lie that one person really has such power, knowing the truth would likely leak.

This isn’t a newbie getting set up on his dev db who was given too much access to production. They’re pointing the finger so that mechanism that facilitates single point of failure should be independently audited