The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?
Yup - right out of engineering college. Westinghouse. They hired me because I said that I knew my way around a TCP/IP stack. They had no way of verifying that -but I did in fact have such skill, having written a networked multiplayer game (standard course project for CMU's "Operating Systems" course).
As for "experience", these were different times (1989) where a) people were rational about such things, b)I was more experienced than any of the mid-career engineers on some critical tech, c) Westinghouse was the place one got nuclear experience.
Finally, I'll say that it was the best job experience of my career. I worked with an amazing team of dedicated engineers. And unlike today, they were all engineers.
I am very curious how you wound up there.
The other comments are talking about minimum safe paranoia levels from the perspective of the applicants, but there's also the facility to consider: it would be reasonable/expected/etc to require everyone signing off on significant work to have maybe 10-15 years experience or so. I take it this wasn't happening?