At a former workplace, someone had a great idea to collect and aggregate the logs of our software from across our test labs. At the time, the idea was a bit nov

At a former workplace, someone had a great idea to collect and aggregate the logs of our software from across our test labs. At the time, the idea was a bit novel for a bunch of programmers and testers who shipped and didn't run their own software. The plan was to drive elimination of commonly logged errors through bug fixes or reducing the severity of the messages. I was a lowly programmer, invited to a meeting of distinguished engineers and senior staff to review some of the findings from the log collections. When NPEs came up, their comment was that 'there should be zero NPEs' and that they would handle them punitively through reports to managers. So, I asked, "What's your recommendation to the developers to prevent the NPEs?". Silence, nothing. Findbugs existed at the time, and I believe JSR303 was in draft. Happy to report they decided to treat it the same as any other error or bug.