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There’s a middle ground. Get the appropriate stakeholders involved in the decision, including security. Let security be the ones to keep the system down, if it
by bshacklett 2y ago
There’s a middle ground. Get the appropriate stakeholders involved in the decision, including security. Let security be the ones to keep the system down, if it cones to that. Or, let the business operations folks make the decision to go over security’s head. Either way, this is not something an engineer tasked with fixing an outage should be making the decision on.
- ibash 2y ago> this is not something an engineer tasked with fixing an outage should be making the decision on I don’t get this at all. I’d much prefer a team of highly empowered and highly responsible engineers than impotent engineers who need hand holding in case they make a mistake.
- bshacklett 2y agoWell, good thing that wasn’t what I suggested. Engineers _should_ have leeway in how they resolve issues. As I read, though, you have a company policy which explicitly disallows the action you needed to take to fix the problem (if I misread, my apologies). Getting the stakeholders involved is the responsible thing to do when policies need to be broken. Ideally, the way this kind of situation gets handled should be documented as part of a break-glass policy, so there’s no ambiguity. If that’s not the case, though, the business should get to decide, alongside the policy maker (e.g.: security), whether that policy should be broken as part of an emergency fix, and how to remediate the policy drift after the crisis. If you’re all tight enough that you’re allowed to make these kinds of decisions in the heat of the moment, that’s great, but it should be agreed upon, and documented, beforehand.