It's about what broke, not who broke it
rachelbythebay.com
It's about what broke, not who broke it
1–10 of 105 posts
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#2I had to then tell them that this person still worked there.
The old IBM story is worth mentioning in relation to this: http://www.mbiconcepts.com/watson-sr-and-thoughtful-mistakes...
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#3I used to think this way until I started working with someone who was nearly always the one who broke it. At some point we just had to face the fact that his work was unreliable even after significant mentoring.
If the tasks were difficult that would be one thing, but I'm talking about stuff like committing code to prod that was clearly never even executed once.
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#4I don't know. Where I work no discernible pattern can be found with the "what" that broke.
It's always the same f*ing people that break it though!
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#5I used to think this way until I started working with someone who was nearly always the one who broke it. At some point we just had to face the fact that his work was unreliable even after significant mentoring. If the tasks were difficult that would be one thing, but I'm talking about stuff like committing code to prod that was clearly never even executed once.
Sure and those people exist. However what you're really looking for is remorse + understanding of the magnitude of the issue.
If you have those two things then someone is already motivated to learn from what happened and will probably never make that mistake again(which are the large majority of engineers in my experience).
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#6I like this site and hadn't really read much from it - it's interesting how much it's been front paged over the last couple of weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=rachelbythebay.com
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#7My manager at work especially has the reverse attitude where the person who broke it is more significant than what broke/how we fixed it/ how to avoid it in the future. I have seen people get taunted for a bug they caused two years ago, a bug which didn't affect any revenue or was pretty easy to fix. And of course it still gets pointed out during appraisals.
Its a nightmare, because there's no room for experiment left anymore. Everyone just sticks to the template, afraid to do more than required, never deleting unused code etc. An attitude like this never ever helps!
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#8Ooh, this is good. Part of it's covered under the name of "blameless post-mortems," but I don't remember searching for similar breakage, which is a great idea.
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#9My manager at work especially has the reverse attitude where the person who broke it is more significant than what broke/how we fixed it/ how to avoid it in the future. I have seen people get taunted for a bug they caused two years ago, a bug which didn't affect any revenue or was pretty easy to fix. And of course it still gets pointed out during appraisals. Its a nightmare, because there's no room for experiment lef…
Sounds like it's past time to go job-shopping.
Re: It's about what broke, not who broke it
#10I think this is an important piece of organization culture. If the first reaction to problems is blame and punishment, issues are covered up. But if finding bugs and fixing them is considered valuable, there will be less issues in the long run.
Of course I write enough stupid bugs myself that I'm bound to think this way.