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> In a healthy engineering organization, there are no gaps in coverage. Every critical component is owned by a TEAM, not a person. I just joined a large organi

> In a healthy engineering organization, there are no gaps in coverage. Every critical component is owned by a TEAM, not a person. I just joined a large organisation that practices this, and it's driving me nuts. Because no individual is taking ownership, nothing happens. There's no accountability, no drive to improve anything. We ask questions on Slack about "can someone deal with this problem, please?" and nothing happens. Rather than an alarm going off at 2am and the owner dealing with it (again), the alarm goes off and nothing happens, no-one fixes it. Stuff stays broken until it gets a ticket and assigned to a sprint (and even then, people self-assign to tickets, and there's no consequences to not finishing all the tickets on a sprint, so it's still relying on someone to be vaguely interested enough to pick it up and deal with it). I moved from being tech co-founder of a startup (where everything is my responsibility and it's all on me to fix it) to this. It's doing my head in. I think I actually prefer being "on-call" for code I built and have complete control over.

chii 5y ago
> I moved from being tech co-founder of a startup (where everything is my responsibility and it's all on me to fix it) to this likely because the startup you co-founded would benefit hugely if you worked to fix stuff, which means you personally would benefit since you're a co-founder. In an employee relationship, this benefit doesn't flow on to the employee, and thus everyone is incentivized to do the least possible that they can get away with. It doesn't gel with your personality, and that is why it's doing your head in.
ryan_lane 5y ago
Your team dynamic feels broken, and your manager isn't managing well. On-call is a shared responsibility, and so is ensuring that on-call isn't awful. That's one of the main arguments in this blog post. There's lots of ways to fix this, but one of the more popular approaches is to make the on-call responsible for fixing this kind of stuff during normal working hours, and for that person to not have sprint-work during that period of time. The goal is to ensure the next person's on-call is better than yours, which leads to a continuous improvement mentality, with an end-goal of never being paged after-hours, and for all pages to be actionable.
aahortwwy 5y ago
Try taking some individual ownership and see what sort of recognition or reward you get. I've been in organizations like the one you describe and the lack of initiative is often a side effect of hostility to autonomy.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  Thanks, I'll try that and see what happens There does seem to be a culture of "keeping your head down"

chii 5y ago

> I moved from being tech co-founder of a startup (where everything is my responsibility and it's all on me to fix it) to this likely because the startup you co-founded would benefit hugely if you worked to fix stuff, which means you personally would benefit since you're a co-founder. In an employee relationship, this benefit doesn't flow on to the employee, and thus everyone is incentivized to do the least possible that they can get away with. It doesn't gel with your personality, and that is why it's doing your head in.

ryan_lane 5y ago

Your team dynamic feels broken, and your manager isn't managing well. On-call is a shared responsibility, and so is ensuring that on-call isn't awful. That's one of the main arguments in this blog post. There's lots of ways to fix this, but one of the more popular approaches is to make the on-call responsible for fixing this kind of stuff during normal working hours, and for that person to not have sprint-work during that period of time. The goal is to ensure the next person's on-call is better than yours, which leads to a continuous improvement mentality, with an end-goal of never being paged after-hours, and for all pages to be actionable.

aahortwwy 5y ago

Try taking some individual ownership and see what sort of recognition or reward you get. I've been in organizations like the one you describe and the lack of initiative is often a side effect of hostility to autonomy.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
Thanks, I'll try that and see what happens There does seem to be a culture of "keeping your head down"