top | item 19754827

(no title)

orijing | 6 years ago

Have you never committed a bug before?

> A Facebook spokesperson said before May 2016, it offered an option to verify a user's account using their email password and voluntarily upload their contacts at the same time. However, they said, the company changed the feature, and the text informing users that their contacts would be uploaded was deleted — but the underlying functionality was not.

I doubt it was an engineer who deliberately removed the text but kept the contact import functionality.

discuss

order

spaceheretostay|6 years ago

> Have you never committed a bug before?

Engineers who make mistakes that harm people are still responsible for the mistakes they made. You cannot just claim "it was a bug" and get off scot free if your code harms someone or otherwise breaks the law. Also there's no need for this sarcastic tone, "have you never..?"

> I doubt it was an engineer who deliberately removed the text but kept the contact import functionality.

Why would you doubt that? I personally think that situation sounds quite likely. But either way we're just speculating.

Also, don't ignore the part of the parent comment that discusses the manager's (and implied other decision markers) that result in the decision being made to make an illegal change to the code.

Engineer, or manager, or QA assistant - someone or some group of people will have made the change. And "oops that was a bug" doesn't count. Corporations and their employees must be held to the same laws and standards to which the rest of us are held. "Ooops I didn't mean to do that" doesn't fly as an excuse to break the law.