I mean for all we know this was built in semi-intentionally by a team of engineers who quietly recognized this effect of their implementation.

you’d be surprised. it’s usually just the approval of one other engineer. and sometimes you can even force push

That's definitely correct^. In addition, I expect that this feature is intentional, as most requests will use well-typed thrift structs or graphql to perform backend requests (I think) and I would be surprised if the mute word filters were ever applied accidentally.

Google just fired a dev who pushed in some pro union messages into a security tool. All it takes is a rubber stamp from another engineer.

Those pro union messages were informing employees of their rights, and part of the dev's responsibilities were informing employees of their rights. Wasn't the message also only shown on relevant pages?

No, informing employees about labor was not part of the dev’s responsibilities. This employee was not in the HR department and the tool was not for HR-related messages. It was for security warnings.

Part of the justification for firing was that they did an emergency push so that they could push without a code review.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21813619

Your hope isn't compatible with "move fast and break things"

The tone of this conversation is wrong on so many levels

Lower level can equally mean 'direct access' or 'service level' it doesn't have to be a corporate hierarchy thing

Now I have worked at any FANG company, or even larger than 200+ employees, but I've never heard "lower level dev" to mean they have "low level access". Is this a common label to give people who have access to production database for example?

We're so quick to climb onto the corporate hierarchy even as we scorn the 'suits' and their corner offices

Every dev has low level access at some point be it writing or approving production code where do you think the concept of Easter eggs comes from which these clearly fit the description

It seems however we've gone so far up the ass of the corporate machine that we have become synonymous with it

I read a funny excerpt the other day in a book -- when Rome was full of slaves everyone started adopting a slave mindset because it was everywhere pretty soon you can't distinguish slave from master and so it is here when we as devs put ourselves into comfortable stereotypes but what do I know I'm just a low level dev

Probably not, I was just speaking informally.

Which is not actually a Twitter policy....