A variant is in From the Earth to the Moon, where a junior engineer at Grumman confesses messing up vital calculations for the Lunar Lander to his boss, and finishes with "So… I guess I'll go clean out my desk." "What for?" "I figure you're gonna fire me now."
The boss's response makes a lot more sense than the usual fluff, though: "If I fire you now, the next guy to make a mistake won't admit it and we won't find out about it until it's too late."
I wonder how much of those stories are rather wishful thinking of how it should work and not how it does work, when a major screw up happened and some heads need to roll for the sake of it.
I wonder how would the boss explain it to his bosses/shareholders. Was that totally a known possible outcome that merely surfaced by chance and subsequently handled without issues under his leadership, or...?
Apollo was very much pushing the envelope of bleeding edge technology, while the bosses were probably not too happy, it was far from the only occurrence, and didn't threaten the contract.
The boss's response makes a lot more sense than the usual fluff, though: "If I fire you now, the next guy to make a mistake won't admit it and we won't find out about it until it's too late."