[booi]

I call BS. I've never heard of anybody in government "going to jail" for some sort of mistake. Sure, there's all kinds of threats and regulatory control but when it comes down to it barely anybody is held to any kind of responsibility. It's practically impossible to fire someone in the government for incompetence and that's coming from engineers I know in government who work with essentially weaponized incompetence.

[technofiend]

This is a dated example but since "you've never heard of it", it's still relevant. I worked at Ford Aerospace/Loral and Boeing on space shuttle contracts. Part of the training was a video interview with a sysadmin who left a job on a Friday, went to a different role on Monday and then remembered a script he'd need for his new job. Same employer, just different government contracts. He logged in to his old system and copied it across since his access hadn't been cut yet. Five year sentence in federal prison. Now you've heard of it happening. Happy to help.

[SkyPuncher]

Well you clearly haven’t put any effort into finding examples.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government...

Yes, he shouldn’t have accepted bribes, but in the private sector this would have been extremely unlikely to result in jail time.

Even if jail time isn’t a common thing, it’s far closer to happening to the average person working in the government than it is to those working in the private sector. The private sector simply fires bad employees. The government seeks to be made whole.

[Scaevolus]

When you write "making mistakes at work", readers imagine mistakes like "breaking prod", not "mistakes" like taking bribes.

[saalweachter]

I'm not really impressed by someone going to jail for accepting bribes, even if it's less likely to happen in the private sector.

Show me someone going to jail for bringing down prod or making the wrong architecture call or choosing the wrong platform/backend/language or even just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager. I want to go, "Holy shit, that could have been me!", not "Well no shit he went to jail."

[vdqtp3]

> just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager

That's a Tuesday for some GS folks. Not all, some of the best folks I ever worked with were GS11-12's. Some of the worst also. Very few in the middle.

[soverance]

The company I work for (high profile private sector U.S. defense contractor) has security people (FSOs and such) that are constantly concerned about being held legally responsible for actions (or inactions) related to theirs and other's work (specifically those with personal or facility security clearances). They regularly claim that they can be held responsible for the failures of others.

Their hesitation leads me to believe these legal repercussions happen more often than not. Would be interesting to see some data on the claims. My guess is the people being held responsible for these things aren't your average developer taking down prod.

[nradov]

That's a separate issue. There are criminal and administrative penalties for mishandling classified information that apply to anyone with a clearance, regardless of whether they are a government employee or private contractor. As long as you follow all the rules yourself you won't be punished for someone else's actions.

[adolph]

> As long as you follow all the rules yourself

Sounds easy. Just keep a list in front of me. Maybe a book. Throw it into a RAG on local ollama. Keep a Teams chat open with the compliance folks.

[jachee]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40951064

[banish-m4]

There's an excellent book about this topic. Three Felonies a Day by Harvey Silverglate. Convictions for white-collar crimes aren't about stopping significant crime, they're about building statistics by sacrificing the most convenient bodies for expedient wins.