Blame the dev who pressed “Deploy” without vetifying the config file wasn’t full of 0’s or testing it in Sandbox first.
If the company makes it possible for an individual developer to do this, it’s the company’s fault.
Exactly. All of our code requires two reviews (one from a lead if it’s to a shared environment), and deploying to production also requires approval of 3 people:
- project manager
- product owner
- quality assurance
And it gets jointly verified immediately after deploy by QA and customer support/product owner. If we want an exception to our deploy rules (low QA pass rate, deploy within business hours, someone important is on leave, etc), we need the director to sign off.
We have <100 people total on the development org, probably closer to 50. We’re a relatively large company, but a relatively small tech team within a non-tech company (we manufacture stuff, and the SW is to support customers w/ our stuff).
I can’t imagine we’re too far outside the norms as far as big org deployments work. So that means that several people saw this change and decided it was fine. Or at least that’s what should happen with a multi-billion dollar company (much larger than ours).
Are “product” (PM, PO) and “engineering” (people who write the code) one and the same where you work? Or are they separate factions?
That’s not how any of this worked. Also not how working in a large team that develops for thousands of clients works. It wasn’t just one dev that fucked up here.
Crowd Strike Falcon uses a signed boot driver. They don’t want to wait for MS to get around to signing a driver if there’s a zero day they’re trying to patch. So they have an empty driver with null pointers to the meat of a real boot driver. If you fat finger a reg key, that file only containing the 9C character, points to another null pointer in a different file and you end up getting a non bootable system as the whole driver is now empty.
If you don’t understand what I just said here’s some folk that spent good time and effort to explain it.
If capitalism insists on those higher up getting exorbitantly more money than those doing the work, then we have to hold them to the other thing they claim they believe in: that those higher up also deserve all the blame.
It’s a novel concept, I know. Leave the Nobels by the doormat, please.
Was there a process in place to prevent the deployment that caused this?
No: blame the higher up
Yes: blame the dev that didn’t follow process
Of course there are other intricacies, like if they did follow a process and perform testing, and this still occurred, but in general…
How could one Dev commit to prod without other Devs reviewing the MR? IF you’re not protecting your prod branch that’s a cultural issue. I don’t know where you’ve worked in the past, or where you’re working now, but once it’s N+1 engineers in a code base there needs to be code reviews.
I doesn’t seem unfair for executives to earn the vast rewards they take from their business by also taking on total responsibility for that business.
Wild theory: could it have been malicious compliance? Maybe the dev got a written notice to do it that way from some incompetent manager.
As a counterpoint to this articles counterpoint, yes, engineers should still be held responsible, as well as management and the systems that support negligent engineering decisions.
When they bring up structural engineers and anesthesiologists getting “blame” for a failure, when catastrophic failures occur, it’s never blaming a single person but investigating the root cause of failures. Software engineers should be held to standards and the managers above them pressuring unsafe and rapid changes should also be held responsible.
Education for engineers include classes like ethics and at least at my school, graduating engineers take oaths to uphold integrity, standards, and obligations to humanity. For a long time, software engineering has been used for integral human and societal tools and systems, if a fuck up costs human lives, then the entire field needs to be reevaluated and held to that standard and responsibility.
This is why every JR Engineer I’ve mentored is handed a copy of Sysadmin Code Ethics day one along with a copy of Practice of System and Network Administration.
We really need a more formal process for having the title of engineer and we really need a guild. LOPSA/USENIX and CWA are from what I can tell the closest to having anything. Because eventually some congress person is going to get visited by the good idea fairy and try to come down on our profession. So it’s up to us to get our house in order before they do.
