Comment by newswasboring
7 hours ago
Even a senior dev being able to unilaterally delete your prod entirely should not be possible.
But I don't think the intention was to compare with junior devs, its just a popular shorthand for "your process sucks".
> But I don't think the intention was to compare with junior devs
Junior was said specifically.
A better analogy would be if one of your staff engineers decided to connect OpenClaw to his workspace and it found a way to delete the production DB.
The author was an AI reporter. You can’t argue that he didn’t know what he was doing when he made these choices. Any comparisons involved junior devs are just dishonest.
I was using a common "phrase" that highlights individual human error vs systemic failures
Since you are stuck on the semantics allow me to rephrase - "if a single developer is able to delete your entire production db, that's an org failure"
Specifying a junior dev on his first day is a plain deliberate rhetorical ploy to frame systemic blame as more legitimate than individual blame. If not, then why not make it a senior developer? Anybody can fuck something up, but we give special consideration to noobs who make noob mistakes, and that's what is being implicitly appealed to, illegitimately. This journalist wasn't a noob, and using ChatGPT to write his article was an error in judgement but not an actual mistake.
2 replies →
> Junior was said specifically.
Yes, but I think you are taking this phrase more literally than its meant to be read.
I don’t think so. Junior was a key designator in the claim and words have meanings. It would have been easier to leave it out if they didn’t intend for it to contribute meaning.
I think this is turning into a Motte and Bailey argument where the junior dev story is used to push the argument and then it’s backpedaled out when others identify the fallacy.