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Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by JohnFen on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:56PM (#36670286)
But isn't spam like that exactly the sort that will ultimately get completely ignored? I probably get a dozen or so such barely-relevant internal emails a day where I work, and have learned how to recognize them by the sender and subject line, and ignore them.

A "leaderboard" email would 100% be one that I ignore as a time-waster.

Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by esafak on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:59PM (#36670337)
No because the whole org sees it and the org head can tell your team's manager to get the house in order. We did this at my last company, albeit with migrations rather than feature flags. Same idea.

I believe I read about it in a book (perhaps Software Engineering at Google) in the context of test coverage; using a leaderboard for gamification.

Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by JohnFen on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:09PM (#36670505)
Ahh, so the real target for such an email is management rather than the rank and file? That makes more sense. But surely, it would be better to send email just to those people and put the data up on the company intranet for those devs who are curious.
Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by esafak on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:12PM (#36670561)
You can but transparency is a good thing, and if you see it you can fix it before your manager chides you.
Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by JohnFen on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:42PM (#36671060)
The point that I was making is that email might not be the best way of distributing this generally, because in many companies (and most of the larger ones), there is a high rate of companywide emails that amount to just spam. This increases the chances that these particular emails will get mentally categorized the same way and ultimately ignored.

I know that I delete unread about 80% of the internal company emails I get because they're not actually useful, and have better uses for my time.

An email like this, assuming that my own projects are not often mentioned in them, would rapidly get ignored, I imagine.

If the goal is to have the affected teams alerted to the situation, it seems like it would be better distributed directly to the teams individually (a targeted email just to the teams involved) rather than spammed to all of the devs in the organization.

Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by masklinn on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:23PM (#36670776)
It assumes management gives a rat's ass about it.

In the original comment:

> Especially if their PM leaned on engineers to make the experiment "quick n dirty" and therefore hard to clean up.

The PM then just needs to say that they don't have the time to cleanup because they have shit to do, and there's folks out there who pretty much live for this, and are usually well seen by management because they're management's executioner: no matter how shit the idea and execution, they'll get it rammed in.

Re:Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality by esafak on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:32PM (#36670910)
The PM is not the EM. Accountability is driven by the org head through the EM. If none of them care then this system will not work of course.