Gosh, sorry that ended so badly. You took it like a responsible adult — I’d say that your response should be an example to others. I hope things go well for you in the future — you certainly seem to have the talent.

Putting on my engineering hat, I’d like to add that I think the ultimate fault is the programmers who built your CMS. If you build an automatic system, your top priority (after simple “correctness”, which must always be at the very top) should be doing everything you can to prevent career-ending mistakes.

But even beyond that is the 60-hour-a-week demon. I personally like to work long hours quite a lot of the time but I have the sort of job where in any given week, it’s quite possible that I will get nothing done — either because I’m blocked or because I’m low energy that week. This just isn’t an issue as an engineer as long as your overall progress is good — indeed, it’s very likely that my management won’t even know if I have an off-week.

You don’t have that option. You’re working long hours each and every week, and if you screw up, or even if you just walk away for a day because you’re overwhelmed, it’ll cost you your job.

I see it as “you getting sandbagged by your inferior tool when you were overworked”. You got ripped off and none of the actual culprits — the management of the Daily News and almost equally, the engineers who wrote your CMS — will suffer any problems from it or adjust their broken systems to prevent this from happening in future.