3 ms·

> and it should come out of the salary of whoever caused it by indulging their own laziness and convenience by abusing regular expressions so carelessly and cas

by mankyd 10y ago

> and it should come out of the salary of whoever caused it by indulging their own laziness and convenience by abusing regular expressions so carelessly and casually. No. People make mistakes. Honest, unintentional, well-meaning mistakes. Don't punish individuals for being human. Help them learn from them. Don't make individuals afraid to do their job. Should the _organization_ be punished? Should they pay more than $1000? That's well worth discussing.

DonHopkins 10y ago
So do you believe that a patient shouldn't be able to sue their doctor who took a shortcut that caused them harm? Some people work in fields where there's an extremely high cost to making mistakes, and whose customers trust them to be careful and meticulous. Those people are paid to be more careful than your average code monkey who churns out regular expressions to save time instead of carefully researching the problem, performing code reviews, and using standard well tested libraries to parse complex but precisely documented standards like html and urls. Developing a browser plug-in to manage passwords is one of them. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -JWZ
- mankyd 10y ago
  I seriously doubt this engineer was operating without code review, test infrastructure, and other safety checks in place. They aren't solely responsible. If they don't have those types of checks in place, that's the fault of the company. If someone want's to sue over this, then sure, sue the individual (and the company). But as a manager in company, I would not not punish the individual. I would have them conduct a thorough post mortem and look for ways to avoid problems like this in the future. People do learn from their mistakes and that is valuable.

3 ms·

> and it should come out of the salary of whoever caused it by indulging their own laziness and convenience by abusing regular expressions so carelessly and cas

by mankyd 10y ago

DonHopkins 10y ago
So do you believe that a patient shouldn't be able to sue their doctor who took a shortcut that caused them harm? Some people work in fields where there's an extremely high cost to making mistakes, and whose customers trust them to be careful and meticulous. Those people are paid to be more careful than your average code monkey who churns out regular expressions to save time instead of carefully researching the problem, performing code reviews, and using standard well tested libraries to parse complex but precisely documented standards like html and urls. Developing a browser plug-in to manage passwords is one of them. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -JWZ
- mankyd 10y ago
  I seriously doubt this engineer was operating without code review, test infrastructure, and other safety checks in place. They aren't solely responsible. If they don't have those types of checks in place, that's the fault of the company. If someone want's to sue over this, then sure, sue the individual (and the company). But as a manager in company, I would not not punish the individual. I would have them conduct a thorough post mortem and look for ways to avoid problems like this in the future. People do learn from their mistakes and that is valuable.