The problem is not the employee who pushed the button. It's whomever designed a system with no checks and balances against a single human operator's error, give

The problem is not the employee who pushed the button. It's whomever designed a system with no checks and balances against a single human operator's error, given the severity of the outcome. No way we should accept errors like this as some sort of blameless par for course in software engineering. Especially as SV grows more and more into life-critical systems like autonomous vehicles. If there was deep incompetence in architecting a system like this then yes, potentially the employees responsible for that architecture could be disciplined. If the responsible employees were too junior to design appropriate safeguards correctly, then the finger points at the managers who set up the team that way. It sounds like the parties to blame here lie somewhere in the management chain between the poor unfortunate button-pusher and the director of all emergency management for Hawaii.