"Resigning"?

The CEO of Optus - the telco which had the major outage a little while back - has resigned. 

Everyone else seems to think this is a "good thing". Perhaps it is but I am wondering why we are holding her almost solely responsible for (a) the cyber attack last year and (b) the system crashing.

I doubt she was the person who wrote the programs which enabled the cyber attack to occur or the system to crash.  I doubt the people who actually wrote the programs could have foreseen just how these attacks and crashes would occur. They should have known they could occur - and they did - but nobody has yet managed to write something that others cannot hack into.

I was talking to a mother several days ago. She lives just around the corner from me. She has two boys. One of them graduated from university about two years ago. He now works in cyber security. It is probably an excellent choice for him. He broke into his primary school's computer system in the last years there "just to show them if I could do it how easy it would be for someone else to do it". He didn't do any damage. He didn't read anything he should not have read. He simply left a message telling the school secretary he had done it and that the system needed to be upgraded and secured. (They did it. He was hauled in and told "Don't do anything like that again - but thank you.")

I am quite sure O... could find his way around any number of systems and cause a great deal of harm if he was so minded. Thankfully he is a very thoughtful, caring and honest young man who would never do deliberate harm to anyone.  

But why should the CEO of an organisation be required to resign because of the failure of others to do their jobs, foresee what others might do or take responsibility for something that could not possibly have been prevented? Oh, she wasn't communicating with the public? Was she actually at work getting the necessary teams to get on with the job?

There was outrage when the previous Prime Minister was "on holiday" during some of the worst bushfires this country has ever known. "He should be home dealing with all this, showing some leadership!" It mattered not that he was not the person responsible for actually dealing with fighting the fires, that it was a state responsibility. It mattered not that the situation developed while he was on a well earned short break with his family - and that people in that position leave the country because that is how they are actually able to hand the position over to a caretaker for a short time. Even then they are always available.  They know they need to be. It is all too easy for the rest of us to criticise and then expect them to fall on their swords when things go wrong.

So the CEO of Optus has fallen on her sword. She has taken responsibility even though this very serious incident was not actually her fault. I suppose it is the price you pay for having the "top" job anywhere but I couldn't help hoping that she had someone there for her as well.