I'm not him, but I would guess that he would respond by saying that we have a moral and ethical responsibility to remain in control of what we're putting into the world. If there's a conflict between the given timelines and how quickly a human can understand the problem and the implications of the decision being made, then the thing that needs to budge is the timeline.
Standing by morals and ethical responsibilities is hard, it takes mental and physical energy and there are plenty of ethical fights we all have to concede every day as a result. But at the “society” level, I think this sort of rhetoric just leads us further down the hole. We can continue to fight the battles that we have the willpower and means to fight, and that’s a very individual decision. Principled people with high tolerance for bullshit (seemingly like the guy in TFA) can make a lot of difference, IMO.
This just reminds me of the whole bun fiasco. If your manager asks you to rewrite a years-old codebase in a week for immediate deployment, is it not acceptable to push back?
If you work in a regulated industry, or even just if your product has had a tough relationship with incidents of late, that makes this kind of push back even more defensible.
He probably has a lot to say on the topic, but it’s not up to him. The accommodations only extend to reasonable affordances, but do not entirely exempt the person from requirements to perform to the level of expectation for the job.
There's nothing in the article to suggest that performance of his actual duties as an administrator have been called into question. The issue under contention, as the article frames it, is the University trying to dictate the details of how that work gets done.
There are some who would call that micro-management.
They're not talking to us, they're crafting a viral e/acc tweet. I admit I don't quite understand the point of doing that deep in an HN comment thread, but once you realize what's happening you see it a lot. Perhaps if you read too much viral ragebait it starts to be your default mode of communication.
I don't think that projecting opinions that you don't think are reasonable upon someone who didn't actually say those things, or clinging tightly to the Goomba fallacy with phrases like "guys like the one in the article", will get you very far toward understanding what he actually said.
Which is self-defeating. If you don't make a good faith effort to understand what he said then you're leaving yourself in a poor position to credibly argue against it.
