You'd be surprised how often I've found leaked API tokens, passwords in plaintext etc on github for instance.

Universities grant degrees based on the successful completion of course requirements. I don't know if it's fair to conflate that with what you said. As long as you can get C or better in every course required, you have a degree. Does that necessarily mean that you are competent?

It's an even further stretch if you think that at University cares all that much if one of their Computer Science graduates makes a mistake.

It means that the university granted you a degree (and, indeed, the med student who got a D average in every class is still called "Doctor" when they finish the process). The point is: universities have a vested interest in the question "Does that degree indicate you have competence?" and incentives to change if the answer, on average, trends toward "no" for their graduates. Corporations have no particular vested interest in the question "Does the corporation's name on an ex-employee's résumé mean that employee has competence?" That's some competitor's problem, not theirs.

> Universities don't grant degrees until someone has proved they have whatever competency the degree indicates

That is not a rule. I have interviewed countless folks with CS and CE degrees that can't get past basic scalability questions in abstract systems design. I've started plenty of hour long interviews only to learn five minutes in that the candidate has a four year degree and cannot correctly identify a use case for binary search nor implement it in plain code.

> Universities have a reputation to lose if they grant a degree to someone who goes on to mess up badly

They absolutely do not lose reputation. We don't publish on a website where the degrees came from that allowed Cambridge Analytica to exploit the American people. Everyone will easily write off the offending programmers lineage as a fluke and move on with their lives. Nobody really cares where you came from in this world, just what you're up to now.

> Mr. Marotto making a major error when he's no longer employed by Facebook doesn't reflect poorly on Facebook.

I agree that this would be a pretty trash take and a poor precedent to establish long term.

> "Former Facebook engineer" means Facebook paid him... No more and no less.

Simultaneously, this is not true. Working for Facebook carries some prestige, as we can see from all the folks who proudly sport "x-Facebook", "x-Google", "x-Netflix" show us. Obviously some people make use of this market and obviously someone is foolish enough to believe the sheen. The value in that perception rests with the viewer; if they hired him because of his work at Facebook then it was significant, if they would've hired him regardless then it matters very little.

haha

you'd be really shocked if you knew about the great lengths people go to get their degree and learning stuff ain't one of them :-)