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Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

In any decent organisation, a bug that goes out to live isn't the developer who wrote the codes fault.

It's a team fault, meant that maybe the PO didnt spec correctly, then the developer implemented something wrong, then this was missed in the code review, then missed in team testing, then missed in testing before going live. Missed in the PO sign off before live...

If anything I would hope that stuff like this by Google helps to encourage orgs to build better processes. If you succeed as a team, you fail as a team. No scapegoats!

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> In any decent organisation

Yes, and in my physics classes I learned a lot about spherical, frictionless cows in a perfect vacuum.

In the real world, the shape of cows is not a sphere, nor even a closed-form equation. And real organization care about blame, and as the saying goes, shit rolls downhill.

There are actually a lot of really good organizations. The ones that don't do basic engineering management well don't tend to keep their good engineers these days.

It's your responsibility to work on a team that handles bugs like adult engineers rather than school children or politicians. Engineers have a duty to be spokespersons for rational and humane engineering processes.

I've shipped more than my share of bugs live. I've never felt like I didn't have a team behind me. Obviously I shipped a lot of things that work, as well.

Working someplace humane and rational doesn't just happen, it requires work.

I expect anyone with "Senior" in their job title to do that work, both in terms of setting team culture and establishing post-mortem policies with management.

>In the real world, the shape of cows is not a sphere, nor even a closed-form equation. And real organization care about blame, and as the saying goes, shit rolls downhil

The difference is that in the real world, organizations exist that don't merely blame the developer, and aren't really that rare. To give you an idea, I simply don't work for managers that are focused on blame. I probe this during any interview I have, or for any position I'm considering. It's on my list of "Life is too short to put up with this."

I don't have trouble finding jobs.

What is a PO?

Product owner

Depends. What if you represented yourself as the multithreading expert and were hired for that reason? The buck needs to stop somewhere.

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