Hacker News Reader

Ha,Ha,ha!, fantastic. I love what these people did. Fixed the broken clock surreptitiously. Its a pity the building's administrator got fired though.

View on HN

That's a typical bureaucratic response. It's a bit like firing the people that figure out a system is insecure and tell management or the response to whistleblowers.

Not quite; in this case, it's that someone figures a system is insecure, tells management, and management fires the people that were supposed to keep the system secure.

The people in charge of the place neither fixed the clock nor kept the place safe, so they do indeed look slightly incompetent.

One could argue that this way the lessons from the break-in do not stay in-house as the people who got fired get replaced by presumably less experienced ones. I get that they want to incentivize people to do their best, but just getting outsmarted doesn't always signal incompetence and the next person on the job isn't likely to be better.

Agreed, but still, for a major historic landmark building one would expect it to have movement detectors etc

Is one of them Harry Buttle?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com