Re:A CTO should be technical
by skipidarink on Monday September 26, 2022 @10:32PM
(#32991011)
I hear you on all of that, I'm just saying that leadership gets complicated. Sometimes the lie is better for all involved, especially the IC. You recognized this with your first instinct on how to communicate it.
As far as the rewards for poorly-motivated actions, we've always got the long term.
Are you lying to the team when you say, "we're not sure how this happened" rather than just quoting the git blame?
Well, no. The problem is much more complicated than a buggy commit. It's a wider problem with the system. So you say "we don't know, we have to look more into it" and do a post mortem because that is the honest truth.
The same principle applies here. So-and-so highly respected person committed a real-life communication bug that got merged into this IC's production career. But the problem is much more complicated than that. You don't know what the actual problem is until you address it with the leadership team.