[Yoric]

Not going to answer for Google, but my company, which I assume has a philosophy pretty similar to Google, will typically not fire developers for buggy releases, but not for the crappy reasons mentioned in the OP.

The general idea is that:

- everybody writes buggy code, once in a while – living under the pressure of being fired for an error that anybody could have made is not conductive to innovation and experiments;

- if you have released a piece of software with a bug, you're now expected to fix it or help fix it and make sure that it never happens again to you or anyone else – not run away and update your resume;

- both learning about the bug and fixing it are learning experiences – at this stage, the company has already (involuntarily) paid for you to get this experience, so fire the person who is now the most knowledgeable about a problem?

[tehlike]

This.

We accepted that bugs are fact of life, and instead of burdening the engineers with fear, we reduce the scope of damage through data: we use canaries, experiments and monitoring to limit the damage and react fast.

Going against human nature as a result just slow things down. The other benefits to above setup is engineers are less afraid to make mistakes and are willing to try ideas more since it is now very cheap to try them

There are times when you need to be more thorough such as medical devices, space programs, and so on as they might risk human life, but for the most part you will go really far with above

Disclaimer: current google employee