With the recent flurry of US federal firings, many people are pointing and laughing at the Trump-voting federal employees who are just now finding out that they’ve voted for themselves to be let go. How could you have this poor a mental model of what your job even is? Well. In my opinion, many software engineers are operating under a mental model that’s just as bad, and are often doing the equivalent of voting for the person promising to fire them. I won’t quote the tweets, but I regularly see s...