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But this is a whole series of junior level mistakes: * Not dealing with null data properly * Not testing it properly * Not having test coverage showing your

But this is a whole series of junior level mistakes: * Not dealing with null data properly * Not testing it properly * Not having test coverage showing your new thing is tested * Not exercising it on a subset of prod after deployment to show it works without falling over before it gets pushed absolutely everywhere Standards in this industry have dropped over the years, but by this much? If you had done this 10 years ago as a Google customer for something far less critical everyone on their side would be smugly lolling at you, and rightly so.

VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
> junior level mistakes > Not dealing with null data properly This is _hardly_ a "junior level mistake". That kind of bug is pervasive in all the languages they're likely using for this service (Go, Java, C++) written even by the most "senior" developers.
- fidotron 1y ago
  From their report: "This policy data contained unintended blank fields." This was reading fields from a database which were coming back null, not some pointer that mutates to being null after a series of nasty state transitions, and so this is very much in the junior category.
  - VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
    It doesn't matter where the null came from, if the language silently allows it then every skill level of engineer will make the mistake.
    - piva00 1y ago
      I don't agree that in this specific case (reading potential null data from a source) it's the kind of failure of null handling that every skill level would do, after you're experienced enough and you are reading values from somewhere with a schema you naturally check the schema to know if you ought handle nulls or not. Even if you are lazy, you want to avoid having to write null-checking and null-handling if it's unnecessary so you will go check the schema. I haven't done such a mistake in many, many years, other kinds of null issues from internal logic I'm still very much guilty of at times, but definitely not "I forgot to handle a null from a data source I read from". It's so pervasive and common that you definitely learn from your mistakes.

VWWHFSfQ 1y ago

> junior level mistakes > Not dealing with null data properly This is _hardly_ a "junior level mistake". That kind of bug is pervasive in all the languages they're likely using for this service (Go, Java, C++) written even by the most "senior" developers.

fidotron 1y ago
From their report: "This policy data contained unintended blank fields." This was reading fields from a database which were coming back null, not some pointer that mutates to being null after a series of nasty state transitions, and so this is very much in the junior category.
- VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
  It doesn't matter where the null came from, if the language silently allows it then every skill level of engineer will make the mistake.
  - piva00 1y ago
    I don't agree that in this specific case (reading potential null data from a source) it's the kind of failure of null handling that every skill level would do, after you're experienced enough and you are reading values from somewhere with a schema you naturally check the schema to know if you ought handle nulls or not. Even if you are lazy, you want to avoid having to write null-checking and null-handling if it's unnecessary so you will go check the schema. I haven't done such a mistake in many, many years, other kinds of null issues from internal logic I'm still very much guilty of at times, but definitely not "I forgot to handle a null from a data source I read from". It's so pervasive and common that you definitely learn from your mistakes.