3 ms·

It's not Shirley's job to make an executive decision, like whether to break policy or not. If the company policy should be ignored, then the issue should have

It's not Shirley's job to make an executive decision, like whether to break policy or not. If the company policy should be ignored, then the issue should have been escalated to someone with the authority to make that decision. IMO the real problem is that the submitter didn't realize that was the case and so didn't escalate sooner. This could have all been avoided by asking for (and getting) carte blanche from Philip or David in the first place.

icebraining 10y ago
Yeah, if I was Shirley, I'd just have suggested "why don't you ask David to overrule this one?", but definitively not overruled it myself.
- jeroen 10y ago
  If I was Ed, I would have grabbed David and told him to tell Shirley to allow the change as is. Probably before submitting it for review.
Cthulhu_ 10y ago
And yet, if everyone is aware not only of company policies, but the underlying principles, everyone also has the authority to deny something. Hardcoded values, for example, would violate a principle about maintainability. Talk about policy and it's politics and escalation and such. Talk about principles and it becomes a moral issue. Alternatively, think of it as breaking a specific law (such as the speed limit) vs being immoral in a more general sense of the word.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  I think making this a moral issue slightly misses the point. Even if Shirley understands the underlying principle of maintainability and is motivated to do the best thing for the company, she is still not the right decision-maker because the relevant risks and rewards are not fully visible to her. Decisions should be made at the lowest level where all the relevant information is available. In this case, the executive understands the pressing reasons for making the change, so is properly able to weigh the incremental risk (with the technical advice of Shirley et al) vs. the business priority, whereas Shirley can only see half of the picture. Imagine if Shirley had gone ahead and broken policy, then something went badly wrong. She likely would've been blamed for the whole fiasco.
  - noxToken 10y ago
    > Imagine if Shirley had gone ahead and broken policy, then something went badly wrong. She likely would've been blamed for the whole fiasco. This is what I was looking for in this entire thread. It's one thing to push through a small change in a small internal program for something that isn't critical like a batch job that clears old data from a server. That's not what this is. It changes the potential output of the entire company. Yes, it's a single LOC totaling out to a single byte. Yes, it passed all of the tests. However, tests are written by people, and tests are only as good as the people who write them. This is partially why there are human eyes in the QA/IT/UAT phases. Shirley would have been viewed as the single point of failure had something go wrong, because she made the decision to break policy.

icebraining 10y ago

Yeah, if I was Shirley, I'd just have suggested "why don't you ask David to overrule this one?", but definitively not overruled it myself.

jeroen 10y ago
If I was Ed, I would have grabbed David and told him to tell Shirley to allow the change as is. Probably before submitting it for review.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago

And yet, if everyone is aware not only of company policies, but the underlying principles, everyone also has the authority to deny something. Hardcoded values, for example, would violate a principle about maintainability. Talk about policy and it's politics and escalation and such. Talk about principles and it becomes a moral issue. Alternatively, think of it as breaking a specific law (such as the speed limit) vs being immoral in a more general sense of the word.

smallnamespace 10y ago
I think making this a moral issue slightly misses the point. Even if Shirley understands the underlying principle of maintainability and is motivated to do the best thing for the company, she is still not the right decision-maker because the relevant risks and rewards are not fully visible to her. Decisions should be made at the lowest level where all the relevant information is available. In this case, the executive understands the pressing reasons for making the change, so is properly able to weigh the incremental risk (with the technical advice of Shirley et al) vs. the business priority, whereas Shirley can only see half of the picture. Imagine if Shirley had gone ahead and broken policy, then something went badly wrong. She likely would've been blamed for the whole fiasco.
- noxToken 10y ago
  > Imagine if Shirley had gone ahead and broken policy, then something went badly wrong. She likely would've been blamed for the whole fiasco. This is what I was looking for in this entire thread. It's one thing to push through a small change in a small internal program for something that isn't critical like a batch job that clears old data from a server. That's not what this is. It changes the potential output of the entire company. Yes, it's a single LOC totaling out to a single byte. Yes, it passed all of the tests. However, tests are written by people, and tests are only as good as the people who write them. This is partially why there are human eyes in the QA/IT/UAT phases. Shirley would have been viewed as the single point of failure had something go wrong, because she made the decision to break policy.