Tools: Solved: Acting Cisa Director Failed A Polygraph. Career Staff Are...
Posted on Feb 19
• Originally published at wp.me
TL;DR: Leadership failures, like an acting CISA director failing a polygraph or a VP causing a production outage, often lead to systemic distrust and investigations targeting career staff due to a lack of auditable processes. The solution involves implementing robust engineering practices such as centralized logging, GitOps with the Principle of Least Privilege, and immutable infrastructure to build resilient systems that assume human and technical failure, thereby protecting teams from the fallout.
When a leader’s mistake casts suspicion on everyone, your team’s trust is the first casualty. Here’s how to navigate the fallout and implement technical guardrails so it never happens again.
I still remember the “Great Outage of ’21.” 3 a.m. pager call. A senior VP, trying to “help” the SRE team with a tricky database migration, ran a script he found on a forum directly against the prod-main-cluster-db. He didn’t use a transaction block. He dropped a few… million rows. When we finally got things restored from a 6-hour-old snapshot, the investigation started. But it wasn’t about the VP. It was about us. “Who gave him access?”, “Why wasn’t he supervised?”, “Can we get a log of every command every engineer ran for the past 48 hours?” Suddenly, we were all suspects in a crime we didn’t commit. Our access was restricted, our deployment pipeline was frozen, and the trust that keeps a good team running was shattered. We spent more time defending ourselves than fixing the underlying issues.
That Reddit thread about the CISA director hit home. It’s the ultimate example of a leadership failure creating a blast radius that scorches the very people doing the work. The problem isn’t the single mistake; it’s the systemic failure of trust and process that follows. When the default response is suspicion instead of a blameless postmortem, your entire engineering culture is at risk.
At its core, this problem stems from putting too much trust in individuals and not enough in the process. We build redundant servers and fault-tolerant systems because we know components will fail. We need to apply that same thinking to our human workflows. When a system relies on a single person’s infallibility—whether it’s an acting director, a VP with root access, or a senior engineer who holds all the keys—it’s a single point of failure waiting to happen. The subsequent “investigation” is a symptom of a system that ha
Source: Dev.to
