This sounds like the University of Virgina is just regurgitating information published by Michael Briggs of the University of New Hampshire. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2364 This isn't really a new idea nor a new recommendation. It is sad that it is at least 6 years old and it is being treated as new information though.

Your recommendations are great recommendations! My only problem with it as applied to Terry Childs is that they totally ignores his situation!

Care explaining how you do that while you are in custody at the police station?

I totally agree with you. Absolutely do not violate policy on handing out root passwords by, let us say, giving them out to people over the phone, on speaker phone, in a room full of unauthorized people listening.

Good point. Don't work for a company that is going to put you in a situation that you can't win if you do, can't win if you don't. It makes you the easiest target to become the person to take the fall. But then, if that happened, we would only have stupid people applying for public service jobs such as Mr. Child's. Is that really what we want?

Once again don't work for that kind of system if this is always the case. And for a second time, he didn't have the option you are saying he had.

Okay lets get serious for a second. This attitude of not rocking the boat is exactly what allows these sorts of 'systems' to become what they are. I guess we could all run away, ignore the glaring problems and move on to leave them to someone else. And as we all do that they will get worse and worse. Instead, I propose dealing with the problems. For example, if you are put in a position where people are abusing their authority to try and force you to do something that could cause harm to, lets say for example, a whole city, you should stand up against that. I hope that Mr. Childs wins this case and wins damages that are large enough that the whole tax base pays attention to what happened here and demands that heads roll and that these sorts of 'systems' are dismantled. I don't see how else to stop these sorts of 'systems' to become the norm when the common attitude seems to be to bury your head in the sand and move on when there is a problem.

I'm sorry I didn't realize that government was a game. I take it all back. Since it is all a game I guess it is perfectly okay to make 'good money' and ignore the problems inherent in the IT department of Frisco! I mean its a game! Tax payer money and public employee competence doesn't matter! What was I thinking!?!?

Thank you for pointing this out. I love reading Spolsky and I think he has a lot of good ideas but he doesn't always express them very well. This second half of his closing paragraph is extremely important to put the article in context and I think should have been stressed at the very beginning in my opinion:

Duct tape programmers have to have a lot of talent to pull off this shtick. They have to be good enough programmers to ship code, and weâ(TM)ll forgive them if they never write a unit test, or if they xor the âoenextâ and âoeprevâ pointers of their linked list into a single DWORD to save 32 bits, because theyâ(TM)re pretty enough, and smart enough, to pull it off.

Specifically at the beginning of this article he names Jamie Zawinski as the programmer he is talking about. JWZ is a darn good programmer. There is a reason he has an entry for his name in wikipedia. Most of the people developers work with who exhibit these tendencies that Spolsky is describing in JWZ are not good developers and can't get away with it. It should be pointed out that exhibiting these traits will not necessarily make you a good developer. IMO The point Spolsky is trying to get across is that blindly adhering to a development strategy, tool, or architecture methodology will not make a person a good developer either. I too would rather see more articles about how to make the mediocre developers better.

"Just send over a delivery guy with marinara sauce, pepperoni and cheese on his neck please."