grant a specific whitelist of additional privileges to the users who need to use said application
So what do you suggest when that is all of them? Apart from of course trying various methods to convince the developer to learn how to do his job properly?
Now it appears, that we must change
It's just the people that are utterly feral about the situation that need to change. One medical example is a city where all the orthopedic surgeons had played Rugby and for some reason nobody who hadn't passed the requirements for the medical specialty. Even the woman that thought she could get around the unspoken qualification by being a match doctor at state level games didn't pass despite high scores. So no girls or weedy nerds allowed.
We've got similar shit festering in IT and it's dragging us down by creating monocultures where it manifests.
So it's not about change unless there's counterproductive unwritten rules that probably need to be changed.
It would have helped if he'd used that time to actually come up with a plan........
What plan then - help ISIS, help other groups backed by Iran or help Assad?
I'm not sure time would have helped. A major worry now is ISIS went for deliberate provocation and seem to want us to drop bombs on the area and we are doing exactly what they want. Why they want it is a bit of a mystery, but those video nasties were designed for that purpose.
There never where smart people here, just technicians and wannabe technicians with an inflated sense of self importance.
Not true, when this site started I was a professional engineer - it's only now that I'm a wannabe technician with an inflated sense of self importance.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.