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Re:The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse w... by ryandrake on Friday March 31, 2023 @07:44PM (#35395306)
Yours is a good example! I have in a past life actually used the "you wouldn't bolt a new floor onto a building" argument successfully to push against feature creep.

I think even a small amount of accountability would definitely start some much-needed conversations at software companies about things like "do we really need to retrofit this thing onto that working thing?" and "do we fully understand our dependencies and the consequence of merging from them?" and software quality would be better for it. If the consequence of a bug is low, go for it--the accountability should be low, too.

EDIT, just to add another example. I remember when I felt rushed and checked in some client code that did not implement exponential backoff for request failures--it just retried. Of course that code made it to production and our customers started DDOSing our server when a brief outage happened. I felt terrible about it and honestly believe I should have been fired for it. Yes, management rushed me, but they're not the ones that wrote the code. They're not the ones that made an amateur-hour error. It was me.

Re:The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse w... by mangamadaiyan on Friday March 31, 2023 @08:34PM (#35395722)
> I felt terrible about it and honestly believe I should have been fired for it. > Yes, management rushed me, but they're not the ones that wrote the code

If you felt so strongly about it, you could have quit. Why wait on management to fire you?

It's fairly easy to blame engineers for everything that goes wrong. Engineering doesn't work in a vacuum, the system and processes have to have guardrails in place that prevent lapses in quality, including security, from reaching the customer. When such guardrails have been systematically dismantled in favour of "improving productivity", the management - which removed the guardrails - becomes the culpable entity.

Re:The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse w... by scns on Saturday April 01, 2023 @04:14AM (#35398324)
Interesting. Great that you want to take full responsibility for your work. There is always two sides to a coin though. Strange to me that you scapegoat yourself that hard. Reminds me of the story, where someones error cost the compny millions. He gets called in his superiors office. He says something about resignation. His boss responds: "What? We just invested millions in your education". Every error we still have to make, is a treasure waiting to be dug up IMHO.
Re:The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse w... by Izkata on Saturday April 01, 2023 @01:49PM (#35402319)
> Yours is a good example! I have in a past life actually used the "you wouldn't bolt a new floor onto a building" argument successfully to push against feature creep.

I've seen a few houses built on top of apartment buildings though.