Well I don't know if he is stupid as I don't think you can determine stupidity from a few forum posts. :p

On the contrary. Speak and write all you want.

Don't expect to be convincing though...

Yeah me either.  My first development job was a glorified code monkey and it still sounds lightyears better than that place.  Never even seen a professional salary contract which involves docking ones pay.  Screw up bad enough and you might get terminated but even then I have never seen "take backs" on salary.

I had a job dealing with securities transactions where I found a couple of $20mn mistakes, but before the cost was actually incurred.  No one was fired, nor did I get a bonus for finding the problems before they became real problems.  (That being said, if I hadn't taken it upon myself to rewrite that process from a unwieldy batch of copy/pasted SQL statements, into a Java process with a businessperson-readable XML-based decision tree configuration file, the checks would have gone out with that mistake in 'em.)

Under no circumstances would I allow that company (or any other) to somehow shift the risk of a mistake onto me, if I were working straight salary.  The business is insured for that risk, not me.  If my mistake makes it out of the dev process into production and actually costs the company money, that's the company's process failure, not specifically mine.  That being said, I'm very good at what I do, so that might give me more options as to what terms I must accept to take a job.

Does Bitcoin have enough process and QA to ensure there will never be any noticeable failure in the flagship Bitcoin software?  No.  And "diminishing returns on caution" means that if we required that, we'd still be waiting on the very first release of Bitcoin.

How much money have you personally contributed to ensuring the software you use is bug-free, or at least QA'ed to your exacting standards?  FYI: Your right to complain is limited to approximately that amount.  Well, the max of that amount, and the amount of Bitcoin you directly lost because of the brief split.

Writing distributed systems with many nodes, high concurrency, and paranoid-level encryption systems, is Hard.  And Monday morning quarterbacks don't really contribute anything.

But we won't ask anyone running 0.7 to do that for 2 years. Ask Lukey Jr

"If."  Your experiences in software development and mine vary fundamentally, which forces me to ponder your credibility.
Nominate a successor, then.  You?
I made no speculation as to how much you may or may not have donated (though there was an unspoken implication that seems to have hit close to home.)  Who ever said there was no testing?  In addition to any automated unit tests, there are 250,000+ tests of blocks in all sorts of configurations run by anyone who's ever run a full Bitcoin client and synched the entire chain.  We ran into something on the very edge, and the configuration of the underlying database (not code Gavin wrote, but arguably code he selected) couldn't handle it without editing a value in a config file.  Incidentally, the latest version would have passed this test, because the problem was fixed (this fix, ironically, caused the chain split we're all talking about.)  Should we fire shortpay anyone who didn't upgrade, as well?

And I still contest your "most software companies have harsh punishments" assertion.  I can't imagine any self-respecting programmer working in the conditions you previously described.
Ummm....  You're entitled to your opinion, but you paint this part of your world with an awfully large brush.

To be sure.  But in the context of his original post (I'd felt like I had quoted quite enough already) he was saying that base pay is cut or altogether withheld (which is what he was suggesting should happen to Gavin.)  I've never heard of anything close to that draconian for a salaried developer, and I'm not new to the industry, so I'm strongly contesting the assertion that "most" companies would have this sort of policy.