As someone who formally worked in an engineering profession that required state licensing and now working doing the same job Mr. Barksdale did (not for Google, though), I can't see any sort of licensing helping with this sort of problem.

And I think at this point Mr. Barksdale ass is pretty much screwed -- it's unlikely he'll ever get a job doing this sort of work again.

It's a tricky problem. I know to do my job I need root access to everything. I guess at Google scale you could compartmentalize so the same person doesn't have free access across services.

But at some point you just gotta trust your people.

OTOH, perhaps I just don't understand -- what this fellow did is so over the top it's difficult for me to understand why he would do such a thing. It's wrong on so many levels -- it's just not something I can comprehend.

My read on it was that he's a typical Aspergian nerd (of which there are several at Google), and it never occurred to him that what he was doing was not-okay. A lot in the story seems to support that. Why else is he hanging out with high schoolers - who don't even like him? Why does he feel the need to brag about his position at Google and the power it gives him?

Some people are born knowing all the rules to social interaction. But others have to learn them through painful trial and error. A lot of us got that out of the way in middle school, high school, and college, before we were given the responsibility to do anything truly damaging to ourselves and others. Maybe he just had the bad luck to not seriously screw up until he's at an age where everyone will blacklist him for it.