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by TZubiri 5 days ago
I get the joke, but it's a relevant nuance that the new code, the chatbot, did not have 'the bug'. I still think that the mistake and head that should roll should be the one that published the chatbot.

But it's important to acknowledge that there was a 'bug' in an underlying tool and not in the chatbot, and still PIP/fire those responsible for publishing the chatbot and exposed an otherwise internal tool to the public, and not those that introduced the 'bug' to an internal tool.
1 comments
srdjanr 4 days ago
Why should the chatbot team necessarily take the blame? For all we know, they could have got approval from the tool team to make it public, and passed additional security review for making it public.

Also, why fire anyone after a single mistake?

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TZubiri 4 days ago
I did mention PIP/fire, but to be fair, this looks like the worst security issue in the history of Meta, a company known for an almost impeccable cybersecurity clean sheet.

So yeah, firing somebody or a group of people is on the table. Especially when like 10% of the company was fired last week for unrelated reasons. If you are gonna do it, fire the people who slash the value of your company by billions of dollars.

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cyc116 4 days ago
How not to do blameless postmortem lmao. Non of the the engineers involved in this incident had anything to do with the company-wide layoff. I'm deeply sorry if the layoff affected you. But blame firing/piping more engineers for an incident should NOT be on the table. The negative sentiment towards meta engineers on this post is just wild.
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TZubiri 4 days ago
>But blame firing/piping more engineers for an incident should NOT be on the table.

There has to be a level of fuck up where a resignation is appropriate, maybe this doesn't meet your bar, but surely you recognize that there exists a limit of incompetence that proves that one is not up to the demands for the job.

I used to be on your camp, blameless postmortems, the truth is more important than assigning blame and in all likelihood it's a systemic problem. But with time I realized two things, 1 there's actually incompetent people, 2 if you wrongly get blamed and you don't blame someone else, then it's your head that rolls, hate the game not the player, you have to assign blame to someone else if you are accused.

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