I had thought of the case for <title/> but basically out of laziness talked myself out of writing a separate test case for it, presuming the test cases for a zero-length title and an un-closed title covered the corner cases. (The entire document was guaranteed to be converted to valid UTF-8, perhaps with invalid character substitution characters, by that late in the Content Converter pipeline.)
So, as soon as someone asked me if I had changed the title parsing code, I was 50% sure of which corner case I had screwed up before looking at any code. It took me about 30 minutes to submit a code fix with updated test cases. I think less than 1 billion documents had been processed, resulting in less than 1,000 pages missing updates due to my bug.
About 4 years ago, I was managing a guy right out of school who pushed a minor bug that broke real-time risk calculations for a major multinational financial institution in the middle of the European trading day, prior to the NYC open, and people were yelling over email that they were trading blind. Someone had committed an important change right after his, so a simple rollback was highly sub-optimal.
Remembering how I felt years ago, I reassured the new guy that people were yelling over email because it was important, not because they were mad at him. I told him that I thought he was the most familiar with his change and the most capable person to fix it, and that he should do his best to calm down and focus, but he should let me know if he needed help, and I would do my best to calm folks down. I told him he would probably remember that mistake the rest of his life, but nobody else was going to remember it a week later. He had the bug fix in production in under an hour.
He sent me an email from home that night worried that he had let the team down, and I reiterated that he was going to be the only one who remembered the mistake longer than a week. The post-mortem follow-up was just to reiterate to authors and reviewers the importance of corner-case tests, and nobody brought it up later.
I really only remember it because my manager sent me an email that night praising how well I handled the new guy's first big production bug.
This is outstanding advice, and very well put. I shall be borrowing it, thank you!
I've definitely written more than one bug where post-mortem estimates were over $10,000 in losses.
August 20, 2013, I finished a code change (in Hong Kong) to Goldman's global algorithmic trading system and sent it out to a colleague in Europe to review. A friend of mine was a machine learning person in our Tokyo office and was in town for work, so a bunch of us had dinner and a small number of drinks. I stopped by the office on my way home to check if the change had been approved. It had, and I hesitated a bit to put it in production, because I had a couple of drinks and it was late at night. However, rationalized that I had written all of the code while awake and without a drop of alcohol, and pushed the change into production.
I woke up the next morning to read news [1] that Goldman had lost up to 100 million dollars in an automated trading problem within 1-2 hours after I pushed my change. I couldn't see how my change could possibly have caused that error, but was still a bit panicked until I reassured myself that my cell phone would have been called once a minute until I woke up if I had made a change that caused a loss of that magnitude.
I went into the office and saw that a chat window I had open with a friend in the NY office showed "presence unknown". An email sent to them bounced. So, I walked over to the derivatives (Flow) Strats desk, sat down in an empty chair next to one of my friends, and just quietly said "... so " and the name of my friend in NY. My friend on the Flow desk's eyes got wide and he said "how did you know?". I actually didn't know until the Flow Strat's reaction confirmed my guess.
My friend in New York was actually very careful, but he had been working under time pressure late at night and pushed a bug into production. He'd been more responsible than I had the night before. I got really lucky, and he got really unlucky. He's actually a really solid engineer. He caught plenty of very subtle bugs in other people's code, at least once when he hadn't been asked to review the code.
After August 20, 2013, if at all possible, I push changes into production before noon, and not on Fridays.
If memory serves the "maybe $100 million" ended up being around $28 million.
And that's the time that I could have easily caused a $28 million loss.
There was also a time I misplaced a paren and had a bad actor noticed, they could have used 60 million customer computers in a DDoS UDP traffic amplification attack. My test cases weren't matching my hand-worked-out examples, but I eventually just gave up and assumed my code was correct and put incorrect values in the message authentication code test vectors. Never roll your own crypto, especially if your test vectors aren't coming out as you expect. That was 2004.
Edit: if you are managing someone who is new in a job, it's your job to make sure they don't push bugs to break important stuff in the first place.
Yes, I and the person who reviewed the change bear more responsibility than the new developer. Also, I say "new guy", but the person who had interned with us the Summer after "the new guy" had already joined full time at that point, so "the new guy" had been working full time with the team for at least 9 months at that point. I also remember the room where it happened, which wasn't the first room we were in, so maybe he had been with us full time more like 18 months. In any case, it was the first time when he was trying keep the weight of billions of dollars out of his head and calmly but quickly fix a bug.
That's impractical in organizations with flatter structures and general purpose communication channels.
What would you suggest, kicking everyone off of internal IRC/Slack/mailing lists/etc.?
I guess there is some pressure/tiredness/newness/taste/external factors driving the choices, test count, and style guide aberrations.
Have you tried trigraphs? (/me ducks.)
I think it was an issue of familiarity and comfort, not newness. The author joined Google before I did. If you're basically working with one other person, and you're rarely getting code reviews from outside your coding pair, and few other people interact with your code, it's easy to develop some bad habits and forget that your code choices have externalities. To be fair, the externalities were usually rather small.
One can never, however, be sure that someone really feels that way ("The secret to success is sincerity - once you can fake that, you've got it made!") Nevertheless, faking it involves never saying certain things, and that turns out to be hard, so the fallible approach that I aspire to is to assume sincerity unless given evidence to the contrary.
In this view, blameless postmortems are the right way to go, at least up to a point: neither embarrassment nor regret are things that can truly be imposed from outside, and definitely not sincerity.
But culture isn't a magic tool that completely neutralizes assholes, and there are assholes in _every_ organization of sufficient size, like the "[name redacted]" character in the previous post
Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times. I remember the first name and face of the guy who submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and intentionally left his name out.
New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this happened all within the New York office between people who generally got along pretty well and knew each other decently.
In context, there was a heavy note of respect for someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or someone who wasn't used to New York culture.
As a lifelong Californian who moved to NY, this makes sense.
Though I don't know if it's a blanket excuse... There's a reason that my friends at Goldman would agree that Google's culture is better, and a lot of it has to do with the difference between CA and NY culture. I completely dismiss the claims that the difference is just about surface-level abrasiveness, instead of noticeable differences in how unkindly people treat each other. I regularly see strangers here treat each other in ways that I didn't see in 30+ years in California.
Ie, "he's from New York" isn't quite a rebuttal to "he's being an asshole at work". The work culture is more tolerant of assholes, but that barely makes it better.
New York and Hong Kong are both very impatient places that don't suffer fools lightly. They're both brutally honest places, but with strong shared identities. Both places have lots of people from elsewhere who are sympathetic to being new to the city.
The quintessential New York story is the woman pushing a stroller (buggy, for my overseas friends) out of a subway car. A man in a hurry is passing her, looks over his shoulder, they make eye contact and silently agree he should help. He grabs the front of the stroller, they carry it up the stairs, and he sets the stroller down at the top of the stairs. They give each other a nod, and he runs off. Never a word is spoken. On the other hand, if you stop in the middle of the sidewalk to read a map or talk on the phone in New York, don't be surprised if people bump into you, perhaps on purpose.
I just left Goldman after more than a decade. I actually really preferred the corporate culture to the Google culture, but most of my time was in Hong Kong. I even knew a couple of people who worked at Goldman, went to Google, and came back to Goldman. I don't doubt that there are some assholes there, particularly in trading, but my experience in both Strats and Technology was overwhelmingly positive. In my experience, abusive MDs didn't last long, but maybe I was very lucky. If you're having a tough time, I don't want to give out full names, but some pretty unique names: Laurent, Jia, Dunstan, and C.K. all really seem to care for their folks. The heads of SRE, One Delta Strats, and Flow Strats in Hong Kong also seem to be really great managers, but Grahaeme, Nick, and Alain are pretty common names.
At Google, a friend of mine managed a couple of small teams (on a shoestring budget, using mostly interns) and completed a couple of projects ahead of time, only to get them cancelled by middle management right before launch. One of the projects even had heavy buy-in from upper management, but he got essentially zero credit for either one because they were cancelled before launching. It was incredibly frustrating for him and he left. In my experience, Goldman runs projects much better, particularly using "Projito" internal contracts that list the value proposition, deliverables, timetable, and whose budget is paying for it.
Also, despite Goldman's reputation, I saw a lot less arrogance at Goldman than at Google. Goldman has a much more healthy respect for its competitors, though with good reason. I've also seen a few people transition from Google to Goldman and take a bit of time to adjust to the idea that Google's way of doing things is best in Goldman's operating environment. At Google, I got the sense that lots of people thought that Google was better than its competitors because they were smarter. At Goldman, I got the sense that lots of people felt they were better than their competitors because they had higher expectations of themselves.