Justify firings carefully
Posted Jan 30, 2003 14:47 UTC (Thu) by
utoddl (subscriber, #1232)
In reply to:
Not so fast by ncm
Parent article:
A look at the MS-SQL worm
It would be hard to justify not firing someone who was responsible for any of the hosts involved.
Right. Let's just list the benefits to the org that such firings bring:
- We were short-handed before, now we're spread even thinner.
- The person with the most valuable, recent, first-hand, hard-earned experience -- i.e., the one least likely to make such a mistake again -- just left the building with his personal possessions in a box.
- The remaining staff lives in fear and dread, knowing that all people make mistakes, and their next one may cost them their jobs, or...
- their coworker's mistake may result in their workload suddenly increasing with likely no increase in pay.
I could go on. If the person was incompetent to start with, then performance reviews should indicate it and he/she would end up being fired eventually anyway. If the reviews don't indicate incompetence, then there's a management problem that arbitrary firings won't solve. But firing someone for making a mistake
and getting caught brings no benefit.
Question: Suppose the unpatched service had been discovered a week before the worm. Would you fire the admin on the spot even though no damage had resulted? Do you fire everybody who makes a mistake, or just the ones whose mistakes become too visible?
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