I have taken down an entire major website multiple times with both code and operations.<p>It's harder to do for a product dev and it's harder to do in a mature infrastructure, but if you work in infra and you haven't caused a nearly complete outage of the system you work on within a year or two, I would question if you were making any real changes to it.<p>If you get blamed for the outage as an engineer your management is bad. Outages are a result of managements decisions and priorities, and generally not a result of engineer negligence. Blaming an engineer is a way for management to neglect their responsibility. <i>Extreme Ownership</i> is a great book that talks about this.
Like, checked in secret keys to a public repo?<p>Or bad-mouthed a co-worker? Or used degrading descriptions?<p>Or added code which, given a directory with a space, caused the wrong files/directories to removed?<p>Or checked in code in violation of copyright or patent law?<p>Or included comments which, when dug up by the opposing party's forensic expert, aided in making discovery requests your company would rather not have answered?<p>No, never. None of these.
a civilian dot-mil contractor in California said over beers that he was asked to place some code in some repo, with a misleading comment and untrue name.. he did it, so he says.. It was a brag. He is the president of his company, they were paid very well for many years. He has a custom built home in the expensive hills area here, where he sits in bed reading news every day now, due to poor health and painkiller use.