Tech Companies Have a History of Giving Low-Level Employees High-Level Access (theoutline.com)

A reader shares a report (condensed for space): In the summer of 2010, Google fired a 27-year-old site reliability engineer named David Barksdale after it discovered that Barksdale had been accessing the Google accounts of four teens he met through a local Seattle tech group. The spying went on for months before it was reported, Gawker's Adrian Chen wrote at the time. In one incident Chen described, a 15-year-old refused to tell Barksdale the name of his new girlfriend; Barksdale broke into the teen's Google Voice account, listened to messages to get the name, then taunted him with it and threatened to call her. Google was contrite, saying publicly that it "carefully control[s] the number of employees who have access to our systems" and monitors for abuses by rogue employees. [...] The rogue Twitter customer service employee who momentarily deactivated President Trump's account on Thursday night brought this issue to mind. Twitter has 3,898 employees, according to Wikipedia, for 330 million monthly users, a ratio of one employee for every 84,658 users. This means that a single employee may have a ton of power over loads of users, but the value of a single user is low. Their privacy may seem insignificant in light of the greater mob. [...] At Uber, employees regularly abused its "God View" mode to spy on the movements of celebrities, politicians, and even ex-spouses.

Comments

Low level or low paid?

[rsilvergun]

I've had lots of high level access over the years because I need it to do my job. I've also seen lots of overworked, overtired people in charge of massively important systems because in theory the work isn't that hard. The thing is, if you pay somebody minimum wage they live like somebody making minimum wage. Meaning their lives are a never ending parade of problems they can't solve. They're going to make mistakes, and you're going to pay for them. The only question is do you save more money by paying them like crap than you do cleaning up the mistakes. Depress wages far enough and the answer is 'yes'.

What's a "site reliability engineer"?

[Anonymous Coward]

In engineering school, that major didn't exist - nor does it anywhere. Is it like a "Sanitation Engineer"?
Or "software engineer"? Or "domestic engineer"?

I get calls all the time form recruiters saying I'm an engineer. I say, "No. I'm a programmer."

"Oh, we're looking for engineers."

"My bad. I just read specs and develop software according to those specs."

"OHHHHHH! You are a software engineer!"

"I am?!"

"Yes!"

"OK. So, what's a programmer?"

"He's someone who takes specs and implements them in the programming language of choice."

"Ah. So, what's a software engineer?"

"He's someone who takes specs and implements in the programming language of choice using engineering principles."

"Ok. So, Thermo is involved?"

"What do you mean by 'Thermo'?"?

"Never mind. So, whatever - programmer, engineer, god, ....whatever the title is, I'll take the job."

"You have a problem with your attitude."

"....."