In reality though I doubt this narrative even occurred. Some incompetent engineer likely proposed this fix thinking that it was actually a fix.
Edit: I see I've been downvoted for this comment. If we were real engineers working on things like cars and bridges we'd actually be held accountable. Take some pride in your work people, this is one of the most in demand professions in today's economy.
Invariably there would be someone who would, and if you were the person who had initially refused you probably wouldn't even be aware that it had happened until the bug reports came in...
System tick timer rolled over after 2^32 1ms clock ticks (a little over seven weeks) and the software mishandled it by rebooting and losing control of the process. It wasn't until QA got involved (it turned out they saw it on a long-term test) that we were cleared to actually fix it. It was a two-character change in an inline function!
In some places "cover it up, don't discuss it in email" is the natural response. It really depends on the management and the organisational culture. You can have management who support the engineering team, or you can have management who micromanage and overrule and end up turning a two-day hotfix cycle into ten months of "try soldering a resistor to every single pin on the PCB".
Quitting assumes the possibility of finding a job after spending 4 months doing leetcode 6 hours a day and not having people that depend on you.
Yes, there is a possibility that they are in fact right, but they'll probably be right for the wrong reasons. It's far more likely that they'll just be plain wrong (and arrogantly so). Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
One could suggest to such people to display enough financial discipline to save up a rainy day fund, but this is ignoring all the procedures in place designed specifically for depressing wages.
2) Why should you? Unless you're willing to be homeless and leave society, you're not going to find a way to live in a capitalist society which is pure idealism and no compromises, and you can't effect change in a system from without, only from within. Quit, and someone else will implement this fix - you feel good, which is worthless, and the fix ships, which is bad, and Cisco doesn't change, which is bad. Pick your battles and you could use this result in future - to build other people's trust in your recommendations, to widen the review process before future fixes are agreed upon, to have a proven record of the cost of doing things twice.
However, this is true for literally every language we code in.
That's an appeal to authority. It's also worth noting that nodejs is not a Google project and it is barely used internally at all. Only for small toy projects. Google uses python for scripting, or java for real servers.
It is, but it's also shorthand for "people who are likely to be good based on the fact they've been through a rigorous hiring process designed to filter out the worst engineers". Sometimes, maybe, you should let the principle of charity win over the rigorous rhetorical logic you can use to dismiss an argument because it broke The Rules you learned on LessWrong.
Maybe you shouldn't try pulling the Principle of Charity to support an argument from authority.