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Author says in the article they had a 3 day deadline to finish the product and needed to test thousands of cases while already having pulled late nights to keep up with schedule.

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“To the tens of thousands of people whose phones were suddenly and inexplicably bricked: my bad. You see, it was almost the weekend and although I had 3 days to responsibly approach this problem, I had already pulled several late nights, I’m sure you understand”

That's not the point. It's just not sensible to blame this one developer for a horrible environment in which this was the only option aside from getting fired, which is quite onerous a responsibility to put on a single person. This falls squarely on management.

>in which this was the only option aside from getting fired

I don’t believe an ill conceived script was his only option. And the rub for most people in these comments is that the code he wrote should have never made it to his fingers—he *knew* it was going to be rushed into prod, but he didn’t stop and consider that randomly generating numbers in a phone number-like schema to the scale of tens of thousands would actually semi-regularly produce a real phone number?! Seriously?

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