In the places I've experienced with poor management and engineering cultures, what I've seen is management dictates all sorts of horrible, asinine things (like story points being treated as deadlines, etc.) that leads directly to problems like this because engineering is not given the space it need to create robust solutions in the first place.
The prevailing winds are, "Just get it done." The outcome is constant fire fighting and triage because of simple problems like bad data finding it's way into the system.
That happens. But not every time, and even "usually" requires some statistics collecting to be sustained.
Very often people just say "yes, we learned an expensive lesson", and change something that may or may not help the next time it happens.
If the answer to the first question is a bunch of finger pointing or the answer to the second is along the lines of "nothing", heads will likely roll.
My first boss as a FTE at a trading shop made a change to a production database outside of process before a weekend. Come Monday morning, production trading systems couldn't come up for market open. We were also an options market maker. He refused to accept responsibility for his actions and denied there was anything done to prevent it. He was quickly behind closed doors in his boss's office. I had to undo the changes he made the week before (hooray for audit tables) as soon as I could. We were potentially liable for a substantial penalty from the exchange for being out of the market, and every minute mattered. Don't know if we ever did get penalized, but he was fired and out the door by 10AM that day.
I've certainly seen and made lots of mistakes over the decades since, but that's the only one for which I've seen someone canned. Response matters.
That part doesn’t match my experience at all.
Good question though..
Oh, and the rampant racism and classism, thanks to the standard practice of including a photo on one's resume...
Probably not in this case, but you couldn't assume for every...
Maybe the CEO in the book gets his due?
Blaming a contractor? To save face? Isn't saving face. It's an embarrassment.
TBH IDK the book was mentioned on HN and I figured I'd check it out.
Exactly! There wasn't any real fallout for Southwest, who had a shutdown less than a month ago, for similar outdated technology reasons.
There's running lean and then there is running recklessly.
> At a private company a failure like this would see the CTO immediately fired and even the CEO having to beg the board for forgiveness and keeping their job.
That doesn’t match my experience at all.