There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up.

Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.

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thijson 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.

Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former is a thankless task.

If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.

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moregrist 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.

I think you should change “visionary” with “competent” here.

This industry has been talking about how bad it is to have “hero devs” for decades, maybe since it’s ENIAC beginnings. After a few decades, you’d think this would filter up to management.

If you change your example from brush clearing to garbage removal it becomes pretty clear: who should get more accolades, the guy who takes out the trash or the guy who stays up all night treating the infections? Both. It’s management that fired the custodial staff who should be canned.

	▲	bluGill 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Management knows in the abstract. However they also know the value of awards and shipping - both of which can be in conflict. They do not know how to resolve this conflict.

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potato3732842 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everyone says the thing they're working on is critically important. Who's right?

More work gets done for less if you wait until the 11th hour and fix the real problems last minute rather than fix everything ahead of time, much of which will turn out to not have needed fixing.

Yeah there's risks involved but at the limit it makes some sense.

	▲	bluGill 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who is right is the wrong question here (not that your point is wrong - it is correct in some situations but not the one I'm talking about). This is a case where the features we need for the release were planned in advance and management signed off on them - by definition getting the feature done is right (even if it turns out customers don't want it, at this point we have committed as a company). However there are always a few bugs that become last minute stop ship issues that should have been prevented long ago.

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RandallBrown 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I forget the exact details, but we had a bug that prevented logging in to the app for a large subset of users.

The engineer that caused the bug ended up staying late and fixing it. He was treated like an absolute hero by management, even though it was his fault in the first place. (Don't worry, we all fully understood it wasn't just his fault. The whole system failed and he wouldn't have been harshly judged for the problem.)

From then on we joked about adding bugs on purpose so that we could all get similar treatment.

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dwa3592 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's sounds very Shakespearean.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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