Blame in Software Failures

Yes it was sarcasm, since it is common for management to shift the blame on individual engineers in these cases (see for example the Volkswagen emissions scandal and the Boeing MAX crash).

I really don't see a lot of accountability in any of his statements. It just seems like "well this thing went wrong, somehow, and its nobodies fault and hey nothing was lost". I find that to be absolutely abhorrant. Think about if you're one of their junior developers - you'd probably be blaming yourself for whatever bug that happened to get in. That the CEO wouldn't take any responsibility is a complete lack of leadership.To those devs, jr or otherwise - every s

Hey, op here.The premise of the post was a response to the ridiculous claim that when something goes bad, we need to blame the engineer(s) who pressed the button.I tried, through rant, demonstrate that there are other people to blame, starting from politicians who are incompetent in what they do, to CEOs who get compensated for taking the risk, to managers who cut corners, etc.The culmination of the post is that if you want o blame someone, you might as well blame any of the involved pa

The manager should almost always get the blame. Why didn't they get help from another team, why didn't they supervise that dev more carefully, how did the bug get into the code in the first case and were proper test procedures followed. Has there been a history of mistakes which show a pattern that's not being managed etc etc.Ultimately the CTO is responsible to the board for why a problem damaged the business (even if it was all the mistake of a developer somehow). And the bo

a corporate strategy. We cannot blame engineer because we are made to believe they made it because of their manager. And we cannot blame those manager because we are made to believe higher manager did it. And ultimately we cannot blame anyway and just say Google did it. And now nobody cares because people think google is very large organization we cannot blame whole organization for small things.I will blame them for making such system. If we blame them I think ultimately this issue is going

How typical to blame it on the devs instead of leadership.

Because when the company has to man up, and tell the reason of the Fuck up to the stakeholders, the should not be pointing fingers to a person who was not even on their payroll.It was someone's job to avoid this from happening, or they do not have people covering such cases... either way, someone other (person or the company as a whole) than the fired employee messed up for the business/customers and they are liable/answerable.Because people fail... all the time. Good, Smart, Sincere peopl

If a single person can cause the failure during the course of their normal tasks, it's not the fault of that person it's the fault of designers of the systems and processes used by that person.

The problem is not the employee who pushed the button. It's whomever designed a system with no checks and balances against a single human operator's error, given the severity of the outcome.No way we should accept errors like this as some sort of blameless par for course in software engineering. Especially as SV grows more and more into life-critical systems like autonomous vehicles. If there was deep incompetence in architecting a system like this then yes, potentially the e

Just to be clear, I'm not putting the blame on the engineer. Many people are responsible for this failure. What I'm saying is that the engineer is one of the responsible people, and that as fellow engineers we should be especially concerned with making sure that responsibility is correctly performed and has appropriate accountability.