> Firing people for bad architectural decisions is generally a terrible idea

I mean, if we're considering factors that could make fire a developer, suggesting, pushing and eventually failing to implement bad designs and architectures probably ranks among some of the more reasonable reasons for firing them. It doesn't seem to have been "Oops we used MariaDB when we should have used MySQL" but more like "We made a bad design decision, lets cover it up with another bad design decision" and repeat, at least judging by this part:

> So let me get this straight: DynamoDB was a bad choice because it was expensive, which is something you could have figured out in advance. You then decided to move everything to an internal data store that had been built for something else3, that was available when you decided to build on top of DynamoDB. And that internal data store wasn’t good on its own, so you had to build a streaming framework to complete the migration.

But on the other hand, I'd probably fire the manager/executive responsible for that move, rather than the individual developer who probably suggested it.

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otherme123 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> But on the other hand, I'd probably fire the manager/executive responsible for that move, rather than the individual developer who probably suggested it.

And you just teached all your workers to be as cautious as being freezed, never be proactive, keep the status quo as much as they can, avoid being noticed, and never take a step without being forced or having someone else to take 100% blame (with paper trail) if things go south.

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data-ottawa 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of my favourite bosses ever was a VP who kept a bankers box at her desk and very few personal affects.

She told me she kept it there because her job was to make decisions and get fired or leave if she was wrong. She was right about so many of her choices, I would have followed her into anything. Then one day I came in and her desk was empty -- she had an apparently epic argument with the C suite and disagreed with their path so she left (never found out if that was a quit or fired). The team got a new VP, but I requested to be moved to a different team as I wasn't aligned with the new vision.

When you get to a certain level part of your job becomes owning the decisions and getting fired.

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BeetleB 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And in some workplaces, that actually is the way to go!

I once worked in a manufacturing environment where mistakes could be quite expensive. We had our annual org survey and one of the questions asked was "Risk taking is encouraged." Our team scored low on that metric, and upper management was concerned. They held a meeting to ask about it, and most of the team was confused why there was a meeting. They said they viewed it as a positive that they don't take risks.

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess if that's your experience of letting toxic people go, maybe everyone you worked with was toxic? The usual reacttion I see from teams when firing people who seem to make a project/product worse instead of better, tends to be a sigh of relief and a communal feeling of "Lets get back to business".

Firing people making bad choices, people tend to appreciate that. Firing people making good choices? Yeah, I'd understand that would freeze people and make them avoid making proactive choices, try to not do that obviously.

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pjc50 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No, he's right.

Remember you can conduct only one of the two different types of postmortem, the air crash style blameless one (to find out what happened) and the blame-based one (to find out who to punish). Once you conduct the latter, everyone psychologically "lawyers up". You get a lot more meetings. A lot more paper trail. A lot more delay. You don't just pick a database, you commission a sub-committee for database choice to review the available options over the next six months.

That's why government / civil service operations are so slow. They operate in a very high blame political environment.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, so say we have this situation where you're choosing a SQL database. The organization made a choice that leads to lots of complications, where often times the reason for the complication is because the organization made yet another bad choice. Repeat a couple of times.

We do a blameless postmortem about each one of these, where essentially we only focus on the root causes of the actual problems, but somehow it never comes up that there was one individual who made those bad choices over and over, which lead to the situations arising in the first place.

Do you just never address this? Do you continue to say "Well, it wasn't X's fault, it's the system around X that let X make that decision that needs fixing" even when it repeats, and the humans involved can already see what's going on?

In my mind you need to be able to address bad behavior in organizations where choices have an impact on something produced, otherwise we cannot change the quality what is being produced, or prevent production issues, since it's based on the choices we make, and if "we" make bad choices, the quality will be bad.

Ultimately I agree with you in more serious engineering-heavy domains, like airplanes and what not, and it's a sane default mode, to try to address what's happening around rather than decisions by individuals. But I also don't think that should mean that other domains aren't better served by some hybrid model, especially when it's about producing artifacts of some sort, and similar things.

	▲	otherme123 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>was one individual who made those bad choices over and over This was never said, or even implied, in the article. We don't even know if this was a single person choice. You are making up "facts" like calling the person who makes mistakes "toxic", or saying that the choice was made by someone who only made bad choices. We are talking Uber here, in 2017, which was not only playing "move fast and break things" but "move really fast while shooting an AK47 blindfolded". Not only they expected mistakes, but they encouraged them. It would be plain wrong to start firing individual people for making mistakes if that is the environment.