The fireman debate, where management argues that a position is no longer necessary due to technological improvements, while the people actually doing the work t

The fireman debate, where management argues that a position is no longer necessary due to technological improvements, while the people actually doing the work think or understand differently, should be familiar to almost anyone in any field of work. We're currently fighting a whole genre of fire at work that boils down to the fact that a particular system, with many many finicky integrations both inside the company and with rickety old 3rd-party systems, was designed with the assumption that there was a so-called "junior QA" team who would be manually looking for trends in error logs and failed task logs. This position was eliminated with a corporate reorganization, and the many many moving pieces are slowly getting rewritten with different assumptions about monitoring, alerting, and logging, but in the meantime there is not anybody covering this function. This means that we typically only have a chance to fix things after they've started to be an actual nuisance to someone and they complain, whereas with the old team in place we had a better shot at identifying problems before they became a major nuisance and fixing them before anyone complained.