Mozilla did an oops and Twitter is full of people hoping someone got fired for it.. what?

One of their intermediate certificates expired from what I can gather, which made Firefox ditch everyone’s plugins. Pretty big balls up, but it happens. I can easily picture a scenario where a certificate is being monitored but the intermediate isn’t. In fact I need to double check my own monitoring setup..

The main thing that is grinding my gears though are the people hoping the person responsible is fired… what the fuck? I’m a guy who loves his plugins as much as the next person, but to fire someone over this? If Mozilla were to do that I’d be first on the lifetime boycott.

Firstly there’s the human side. Your adblock stopped working so you want to take away someone’s livelihood? This is an annoyance maybe, but a fireable offence? Absolutely not.

Next the business side. Do you think the person who caused this - and that’s even assuming it was a one-person blunder rather than a systematic failure - is ever going to let this happen ever again? Do you think the people responsible for their certificate setup are going to let this slide under the rug with a “lol oops”? This is probably going to be fixed forever as a result of this… if you don’t fire the people feeling personally responsible for it.

Third up.. what sort of situation is the world in that anyone calls for a firing anyway? Firings should be reserved for gross misconduct and things along that line, not oopsies in the day to day work. That’s all this is. It’s an oopsie. It’ll be fixed, it sucks it happened, but it will be fixed. You can’t fix firing someone.

Give it a rest with the calling for jobs. Let the folks involved stew over the issue, not their future ability to pay the bills. Have a heart.

There are two kinds of people in a tech career. Those that have caused a massive outage by accident, and those that will cause a massive outage by accident. Let’s hope nobody’s calling for your job when it happens to you, eh?

Stock image. The foreground has a man in the centre. He’s working at a laptop looking stressed, left hand in hair and a grimace on his face. In the background behind the laptop man to our left are two gentlemen in smart casual dress looking at a calculator or something. Far right of theimage is a screenshot with generic token businessy words