Show me someone going to jail for bringing down prod or making the wrong architecture call or choosing the wrong platform/backend/language or even just getting burnt out and spending a week on the clock re-watching all of Star Trek: Voyager. I want to go, "Holy shit, that could have been me!", not "Well no shit he went to jail."
That's a Tuesday for some GS folks. Not all, some of the best folks I ever worked with were GS11-12's. Some of the worst also. Very few in the middle.
Their hesitation leads me to believe these legal repercussions happen more often than not. Would be interesting to see some data on the claims. My guess is the people being held responsible for these things aren't your average developer taking down prod.
Sounds easy. Just keep a list in front of me. Maybe a book. Throw it into a RAG on local ollama. Keep a Teams chat open with the compliance folks.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/former-federal-government...
Yes, he shouldn’t have accepted bribes, but in the private sector this would have been extremely unlikely to result in jail time.
Even if jail time isn’t a common thing, it’s far closer to happening to the average person working in the government than it is to those working in the private sector. The private sector simply fires bad employees. The government seeks to be made whole.