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CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

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Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#11

Post by quietbritishjim »

nyc_data_geek1 wrote: post #4
Alupis wrote: post #2

> “Speed was the most important thing,” said Jeff Gardner, a senior user experience designer at CrowdStrike who said he was laid off in January 2023 after two years at the company. “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.” This type of article - built upon disgruntled former employees - is worth about as much as the apology GrubHub gift card. Look, I think just as poorly about CrowdStr…

>>So basically we have nothing. Except the biggest IT outage ever. And a postmortem showing their validation checks were insufficient. And a rollout process that did not stage at all, just rawdogged straight to global prod. And no lab where the new code was actually installed and run prior to global rawdogging. I'd say there's smoke, and numerous accounts of fire, which this can be taken in the context of.

The sentence you quoted clearly meant, from the context, "clearly we have nothing [to learn from the opinions of these former employees]". Nothing in your comment is really anything to do with that.

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#12

Post by tw04 »

sonofhans wrote: post #7
Alupis wrote: post #2

> “Speed was the most important thing,” said Jeff Gardner, a senior user experience designer at CrowdStrike who said he was laid off in January 2023 after two years at the company. “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.” This type of article - built upon disgruntled former employees - is worth about as much as the apology GrubHub gift card. Look, I think just as poorly about CrowdStr…

If design isn’t involved in QC you’re not doing QC very well. If design isn’t plugged into development process enough to understand QC then you’re not doing design very well.

Why would a UX designer be involved in any way, shape, or form in kernel level code patches? They would literally never ship an update if they had that many hands in the pot for something completely unrelated. Should they also have their sales reps and marketing folks pre-brief before they make any code changes?

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#13

Post by darby_nine »

Alupis wrote: post #2

> “Speed was the most important thing,” said Jeff Gardner, a senior user experience designer at CrowdStrike who said he was laid off in January 2023 after two years at the company. “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.” This type of article - built upon disgruntled former employees - is worth about as much as the apology GrubHub gift card. Look, I think just as poorly about CrowdStr…

I feel like crowdstrike is perfectly capable of mounting its own defense

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#14

Post by nine_zeros »

Typical of tech companies these days. Quality is considered immaterial - or worse - put on low level managers and engineers who don't have the time to clearly examine quality and good roll out practices.

C-Suite and investors don't seem to want to spend on quality. They should just price in that their stock investment could collapse any day.

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#15

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Alupis wrote: post #2

> “Speed was the most important thing,” said Jeff Gardner, a senior user experience designer at CrowdStrike who said he was laid off in January 2023 after two years at the company. “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.” This type of article - built upon disgruntled former employees - is worth about as much as the apology GrubHub gift card. Look, I think just as poorly about CrowdStr…

> This type of article - built upon disgruntled former employees - is worth about as much as the apology GrubHub gift card

To you and me, maybe. To the insurers and airlines paying out over the problem, maybe not.

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#16

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Critical software infrastructure should be regulated the way critical physical infrastructure is. We don't trust the people who make buildings and bridges to "do the right thing" - we mandate it with regulations and inspections. (When your software not working strands millions of people around the globe, it's critical) And this was just a regular old "accident"; imagine the future, when a war has threat actors trying to knock things out.

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#18

Post by idkwhatimdoin »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #5
nyc_data_geek1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>So basically we have nothing. Except the biggest IT outage ever. And a postmortem showing their validation checks were insufficient. And a rollout process that did not stage at all, just rawdogged straight to global prod. And no lab where the new code was actually installed and run prior to global rawdogging. I'd say there's smoke, and numerous accounts of fire, which this can be taken in the context of.

There definitely was a huge outage, but based on the given information we still can't know for sure how much they invested in testing and quality control. There's always a chance of failure even for the most meticulous companies. Now I'm not defending or excusing the company, but a singular event like this can happen to anyone and nothing is 100%. If thorough investigation revealed poor quality control investment com…

> If thorough investigation revealed poor quality control investment compared to what would be appropriate for a company like this, then we can say for sure.

We don't really need that thorough of an investigation. They had no staged deploys when servicing millions of machines. That alone is enough to say they're not running the company correctly.

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#19

Post by bdcravens »

Alupis wrote: post #2

> “Speed was the most important thing,” said Jeff Gardner, a senior user experience designer at CrowdStrike who said he was laid off in January 2023 after two years at the company. “Quality control was not really part of our process or our conversation.” This type of article - built upon disgruntled former employees - is worth about as much as the apology GrubHub gift card. Look, I think just as poorly about CrowdStr…

I'm going with principle of least astonishment, where productivity is more highly valued in most companies than quality control.

Re: CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'

#20

Post by bb88 »

Most interesting quote in the article:

    “It was hard to get people to do sufficient testing sometimes,” said Preston
    Sego, who worked at CrowdStrike from 2019 to 2023. His job was to review the
    tests completed by user experience developers that alerted engineers to bugs
    before proposed coding changes were released to customers. Sego said he was 
    fired in February 2023 as an “insider threat” after he criticized the
    company’s return to-work policy on an internal Slack channel.
Okay clearly that company has a culture issue. Imagine criticizing a policy and then getting labeled "insider threat".
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