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So just.. leave the bad actors out of the narrative? It feels like if one does that, then you come back and say "but who is doing [bad thing]? where is the evi

So just.. leave the bad actors out of the narrative? It feels like if one does that, then you come back and say "but who is doing [bad thing]? where is the evidence?". You can't just leave the people causing the problem out, as if it were some how rude to name the people pissing in the pool.

slg 5y ago
I never said we need to leave the bad actors out of the narrative. I am simply talking about not placing the blame on them. It is the equivalent of a blameless postmortem. We are in a constant cycle of firing interns for pushing costly bugs into production without ever wondering why we are allowing interns to push to production without supervision. We just fire the intern and think the problem is fixed. We have learned that isn't a good way to run a company, but we haven't learned that isn't a good way to run a society.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production because for whatever reason it was in their best interest? We fire bad actors all the time.
  - slg 5y ago
    My main goal would be to understand how an intern could intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production. Fixing that is more important than punishing the individual. A broken/corrupt system will do more damage over the long term than an rogue individual because a well designed system won't give a single individual with little experience that much control.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production Probably not faster than I’d fire whoever let an intern repeatedly push broken code to production, without taking responsibility for fixing the deployment process problem they were responsible for, were I at the level where my responsibility wasn't merely to fix the deployment process problem but to address the problem that allowed the deployment process to persist, and presuming that there wasn't a systemic reason rather than simple nonfeasance behind permitting that problem to go unfixed. Especially as establishing the “intentional” part of the hypothetical would probably take longer than establishing a serious and inexcusable failure even in the absence of any intent in the person responsible for allowing the push to be possible in the first place. That's, I think, the upthread posters point. If you have an intern posting broken code to production repeatedly (intentionally or not), you have another problem that is a deeper and broader impact problem, whether individual or systemic or both, than the intern.

slg 5y ago

I never said we need to leave the bad actors out of the narrative. I am simply talking about not placing the blame on them. It is the equivalent of a blameless postmortem. We are in a constant cycle of firing interns for pushing costly bugs into production without ever wondering why we are allowing interns to push to production without supervision. We just fire the intern and think the problem is fixed. We have learned that isn't a good way to run a company, but we haven't learned that isn't a good way to run a society.

skeeter2020 5y ago
Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production because for whatever reason it was in their best interest? We fire bad actors all the time.
- slg 5y ago
  My main goal would be to understand how an intern could intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production. Fixing that is more important than punishing the individual. A broken/corrupt system will do more damage over the long term than an rogue individual because a well designed system won't give a single individual with little experience that much control.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Would you fire an intern who intentionally and repeatedly pushed broken code to production Probably not faster than I’d fire whoever let an intern repeatedly push broken code to production, without taking responsibility for fixing the deployment process problem they were responsible for, were I at the level where my responsibility wasn't merely to fix the deployment process problem but to address the problem that allowed the deployment process to persist, and presuming that there wasn't a systemic reason rather than simple nonfeasance behind permitting that problem to go unfixed. Especially as establishing the “intentional” part of the hypothetical would probably take longer than establishing a serious and inexcusable failure even in the absence of any intent in the person responsible for allowing the push to be possible in the first place. That's, I think, the upthread posters point. If you have an intern posting broken code to production repeatedly (intentionally or not), you have another problem that is a deeper and broader impact problem, whether individual or systemic or both, than the intern.