This is starting to make sysadmins sound like John Wick.

“And then my son, a few days after his wife died, you steal his 3d printers and smash his fcking Apple 1.”
“The sysadmin will come for you, and you will do nothing because you can do nothing,”

If they change the key in memory, then it doesn’t matter that you have the other side of the prior asymmetric key.

Encrypt your logs: exactly what you feared, and someone can just disable the encryption call or edit the key in memory too. Lots of ways to attack it.

People try to be overachievers by exceeding expectations and then are often late or delivering a broken product.

It’s hard to tell perfectionists not to be perfectionists though.

I’ve definitely used WP in that manner as well. At that time there were plugins that would render the pages out to static HTML in object storage. I’m sure there still are, but possibly not the same ones I used.

I just prefer not to use or manage WP whenever possible.

Sometimes those positions are meant for promoting internal candidates, who obviously sat in, conducting the same interviews in the past. So the difficulty is dialed up to “I am Death incarnate!” levels and they then have scoring data to support their selection of the internal candidate. At a friend’s workplace, they’d opened up a 2-3yr exp position to convert a great intern, and had some great 10+yr exp people apply. My friend said that was a little awkward. Even if Mark Russinovich or Linus Torvalds applied for that job, they still had no chance at getting it. I joked that I might put a resume in his manager’s pile for the creator of the tech stack they were interviewing for, just to hear how that reaction was.

That’s probably not representing even… 5% of these gauntlets, but it might make you feel better. Sometimes, it’s the hiring manager fulfilling the letter but not the spirit of some process, but it means they are frustratingly hard on candidates in the process.

And perhaps, ultimately, you have dodged some bullets.

There’s a big chunk of sites that have WP running but are mostly just static content, confusingly. If you update the content once a month and disable all comments, maybe another tool could fit better there. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I enjoyed the book “Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager”