2 ms·
I'm hearing echoes of half the engineers and product people I've worked with in my career in tech: "Oh, that's an edge case. 0.1% of users will encounter it. P
by ryandrake 2mo ago
I'm hearing echoes of half the engineers and product people I've worked with in my career in tech:
"Oh, that's an edge case. 0.1% of users will encounter it. P2 bug, not a ship blocker."
- CamperBob2 2mo agoThe point is, they aren't wrong. You will never get rid of all such edge cases... and even if you could, you couldn't afford to do so. The responsibility to make the larger process resilient to those types of bugs must exist somewhere, and at a higher level than engineering. What's described here is not an engineering failure, but a process failure.
- ryandrake 2mo agoIt's both. "Bugs are inevitable and unavoidable" is a defeatist attitude in software, albeit one that is accepted strongly and broadly.
- CamperBob2 2mo agoThis is like a belief in karma. It's irrational, and it's completely untrue as far as anyone can tell, but we are all arguably better off by pretending that things really do work that way.
- ninalanyon 2mo agoIt's an engineering failure if the designers did not fight for it. In my career as an electronics engineer and later as a software developer it was clearly part of my job to interrogate the specification documents and almost always the customer to discover what the system really needed to do and what edge cases the customer had ignored, forgotten, or was simply unaware of. Yes it's a process failure but just like health and safety it is everyone's responsibility.
- CamperBob2 2mo agoAgreed, but we are lucky when we have that kind of voice, in the larger picture.