Core Viewpoint - The article narrates the unusual experience of a programmer, WDE, who was fired after identifying a critical security bug in a chaotic development environment, highlighting issues in company culture and management priorities [1][2][13]. Group 1: WDE's Achievements and Initial Success - WDE, a seasoned full-stack engineer with 17 years of experience, successfully developed a new SaaS product from scratch in a small startup, achieving a project size of under 300KB and optimizing all performance metrics to 100/100 [5]. - The product generated immediate revenue for the company, leading to WDE being recognized as a "star developer" and being assigned new projects by the CTO [5]. Group 2: The Chaotic Team Environment - WDE was assigned to assist a troubled team, which exhibited disorganized development practices, including excessive use of force push in Git, overwriting of his work, and unauthorized changes to his code [6][7]. - The team's QA process was chaotic, with a single Jira task tracking thousands of issues, and a lack of adherence to agile principles, as tasks had been ongoing for six months without resolution [7][8]. Group 3: The Security Bug Incident - While working with the team, WDE discovered a significant security vulnerability that exposed sensitive data, including private API keys, posing a risk to both the company and its users [9][10]. - After reporting the bug, WDE was dismayed by the inadequate fix implemented by the backend developer, which he criticized for being ineffective and potentially harmful [10][11]. Group 4: Consequences of Reporting the Bug - Following his feedback on the security issue, WDE faced backlash from the backend developer and was subsequently fired by the CTO, who acknowledged the validity of WDE's concerns but stated that his presence was deemed problematic [11][12]. - The incident sparked discussions in the developer community about the importance of engineering culture and the tendency of management to prioritize results over process, often viewing those who raise concerns as troublemakers [13][14].