4 ms·
Scapegoating an individual is also an excellent way to ensure nothing gets fixed. Was it a cover-up of bad behavior when Amazon refused to release the name and
by madrox 6y ago
Scapegoating an individual is also an excellent way to ensure nothing gets fixed.
Was it a cover-up of bad behavior when Amazon refused to release the name and/or fire the engineer whose error caused the 2017 S3 outage? We don't fire or shame those people, and they arguably do just as much damage to the credibility of the organization they work for. Instead, a retrospective is held, they determine how it was possible such a thing could happen, and new checks and balances come out of it. Often you can even read about the entire thing, as is the case in the example I mention[1].
The Caliphate situation tells me that such a thing will likely happen again at the New York Times without better process to prevent these issues. That the institution of journalism wants to blame the person instead of generate learnings, I'm inclined to think nothing changed.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
- zepto 6y agoIt’s not comparable. It’s both an institutional failure and an individual one. We know bugs and mistakes happen. If an organization has a QA or testing process and the code passed through the accepted processes and yet the still failed, we may not hold the engineer responsible. If an engineer on the other hand, ships code which has not been tested, when a testing process exists, then we might well hold them responsible.
- madrox 6y agoMy understanding is that this story was run through the New York Times fact checking department. Is that not the equivalent of testing?
- zepto 6y agoIf that is what happened, then I agree. My understanding is that the fact checking department exists, and that Mills was told he didn’t need to do his own fact checking. But it wasn’t clear to me that the fact checking department did the fact checking. In this situation, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect Mills to be responsible for making sure the fact checking has been done before considering his work ready for publication even if he wasn’t the one doing it. Just like a release engineer may be responsible for making sure the release has been through QA.