I get that this appears to be the conclusion the author wants you to draw. But what's missing, to me, is that she has provided no evidence whatever to support it. The only evidence we have about her boss is his reaction--and I can see a boss with a high tolerance for risk saying exactly what she describes her boss as saying, as a kind of whimsical recognition that the very thing that makes her a valuable employee is that she will take on these things that none of his other employees will take on. So on the only evidence she gives us about her boss, it could go either way.
What I expected to see (and apparently you did too), at some point later in the article, was some kind of follow-up to that specific story she told--some way in which either her boss did or didn't support her in some subsequent development related to what she had already told. And there wasn't one.
Because she is incentivized to make the product as good as possible, not hit deadlines and satisfy arbitrary legislative targets divorced from software engineering reality, it never occurred to her how much s* she was going to cause for the people in the direct chain of management by getting the FBI involved. It's probably the right thing to do... Ultimately, the software was compromised by domestic terrorists and the threat was real. But she's basically just wrecked any goodwill she had working with this department for the foreseeable future (especially if it turns out that somebody in the management chain that she has oversight over has actually managed to break the law due to negligence ;) ).
Ah. That makes sense.
That's interesting, I didn't see it as reporting the other team to law enforcement. The law breaking was anticipated to be done by people outside government. The whole raise your right hand thing seemed weird (perhaps a formality) unless you think she was implicating specific people. In that case it makes more sense.
How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat? You need only one marginally competent one to wreck your entire platform.
Yes exactly. Ultimately security is deeply involved with threat modeling. It is likely that the author's boss did not prioritize her pet security issues because they were a low risk in the threat model.
>How can you possibly believe that a bunch of white supremacists are not a threat?
Domain expertise. Frankly I am somewhat surprised that people with what is apparent to be a television soap opera level of understanding of american dissident activity make public posts on the topic with the confidence they do on here. Not you, of course, but others.
Unfortunately, the most believable interpretation of this story is very boring office politics: Our author, having failed to make a case to her boss, drummed up some internet post in an attempt to get her way. We've all known people like this... they have varying amounts of self-awareness. It is characteristic of such actors to manufacture exactly the sort of attack they imagine to be the most relevant. This is likely to be such a case. What gives her away is that this is some fantastical story that makes sense only in pop culture: if there is even one WS cyber attack on an american federal platform for every 10,000 chinese attacks I will eat my hat and livestream it. These are simply not people with competence in the field of cyber security.
Thinking they are “just” idiots is an entirely wrong take if you are trying to play against them.
It’s like saying that Putin is an idiot because he’s against gay rights in Russia. But if he was really stupid he would probably be dead by now.
That the narrative payoff never comes is such an infuriating let down, you actually end up confused over what the heck you just read!
I think the fact that the story comes with bespoke cover art just serves to raise expectations even further.
We're talking about Matt Cutts here who took what was likely a massive pay cut to work for the government after a long career at Google. Neither does this inference seem credible, nor does the characterization of him as "idiot manager" in the article
https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/matt-cutts...
I seriously doubt that it was the intent of the author to accuse Matt Cutts as someone who spun blame onto others and avoided responsibility.
USDS is the federal government's first attempt to recognize the fact that the United States has no cross-department best practices for software engineering at the federal level. It's an organization tasked with running roughshod over various software engineering projects, but in its first iteration, it served an advisory role, and had no "teeth." So it ran into a lot of challenges where it would try to provide best practices for various government orgs, and the orgs, convinced that they knew best because they've been doing this for decades (wrong) already, could just ignore them.
I believe they have some teeth now, and it may perhaps be because a couple of interactions like this occurred. I know Mr. Cutts himself built up a bit of a reputation as a skullcracker, because it turns out he was quite good at figuring out how to apply bureaucratic leverage (mostly by figuring out how individual team members were incentivized and then aligning the relevant incentives to make them care about getting the job done the right way).
She has a manager who (apparently) has a low tolerance for risk. He probably got to where he is by spinning situations so that it's not his fault. He was upset that she contacted the FBI about a situation and took on more risk than he was comfortable with.
She sees herself as someone who enjoys the trappings of a job well done and doesn't mind her slow progress of ladder-climbing because she's brave and takes risks that her superiors won't reward with promotions.
I liked and identified with the writing in the second half, and it sounds like she had a good scenario to act as a substrate for her thoughts, but I don't think she did a good job merging the two.
Like you said, they feel like two distinct pieces which got bolted together. I found myself with the scroll bar near the bottom and wondered how she was going to tie back in to the original story, and was disappointed to see that she never did.