[LeifCarrotson]

If your boss can't sell which things are part of their output and which are external, they're not doing a very good job. A default Chrome install might have a Christmas-themed homepage, an ISP might MITM HTTP traffic with a greeting, an OS/hardware manufacturer/ad network/other 3rd-party might do something...

The days where the state run website only runs code written by the guy in the department who knows how to spell HTML are long gone. Everyone is working on a very small subset of the huge stack of complexity that makes someone else's browser on someone else's device made by someone else on someone else's network linked by someone else's CDN to someone else's datacenter that hold someone else's server hardware which runs someone else's OS which hosts someone else's server stack and uses someone else's framework to show the data you actually wrote. If your non-technical boss can't explain that some parts of this chain aren't under their complete control they're just not being honest.

[msla]

> If your boss can't sell which things are part of their output and which are external, they're not doing a very good job.

It's been a problem in the past:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060427011138/http://www.centos...

> Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:52:58 +0000 (Wed, 18:52 CST)

> Jerry A. Taylor submitted the following Information:

> Email xxxxxxx

> Company City of Tuttle

> Location Oklahoma

> Comments

> Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???

> Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!

> I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.

And the response:

> From: Johnny Hughes

> To: Jerry A. Taylor

> Subject: Re: www.centos.org - Contact Us Form

> Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:59:18 -0600

> I feel sorry for your city.

> CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer

> that runs your website.

> We hope you are happy with it, since we produced it for free and you are

> able to use it without paying us ... and are even threatening to have us

> arrested for providing to you free of charge.

> Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so

> that they can configure your apache webserver correctly.

> Thanks,

> Johnny Hughes,

> CentOS 4 Lead Developer

Figured out what happened yet, Encyclopedia Brown?

Yep: The city of Tuttle, OK, had a misconfigured/unconfigured site which was showing the CentOS default page. The City Manager of that August Berg thought "We've been hacked! We've been hacked by hackers with a bland corporate logo who left contact information! I MUST THREATEN THEM USING EMAIL!"

Click the link. It gets stupider.

My point is, you have to take the... uh... "violently ignorant" into account whenever you design things which can be public-facing.

[Someone]

”If your boss can't sell which things are part of their output and which are external”

“Don’t blame my personnel. They didn’t write that; they just chose to run random code downloaded from the internet” isn’t an optimal reply to “why is our web site broken?”.

In China, I can see this go towards a “only use packaged approved by the government”, where such packages are signed, and the government knows who to put in prison when a package contains such a surprise.

[TheRealPomax]

This sounds like a gross over-generalisation of your personal experience. Why would those days be "long gone" in a Chinese state-run agency?

[LeifCarrotson]

Because the Chinese state run website is accessible from, say, an Apple iPhone running iOS/Safari. It is probably intended to be accessible from ISPs outside the country. It is developed on Windows computers and hosted on Linux servers, which probably run a server stack that's a combination of open-source modules and proprietary glue.

Granted, your Chinese state-run website is probably more control-oriented than a hypothetical SV startup which consists entirely of connecting VC money to external microservices with a little copy added in by machine-parsing a slide deck...

[MrZongle2]

"If your boss can't sell which things are part of their output and which are external, they're not doing a very good job."

The world is full of bosses who aren't good at their job. And bosses who are flat-out ignorant, capricious or lazy. None of these factors will protect the technical person mentioned in the grandparent post.

And you'd be shocked at how many state/federal resources have a single point of failure. Add to that small-to-medium sized companies, and suddenly there could be a lot of people taking (possibly irrational levels of) heat from their bosses.

[zimpenfish]

> If your boss can't sell which things are part of their output and which are external, they're not doing a very good job.

But it's not -their- job to do that. Their job is to manage resources etc. for the devs.