One thing that isn't often mentioned in these discussions:

Making sure that the work was actually done.

I've been a Staff Engineer and managed engineers and it's pretty shocking what people consider to be "done".

A couple examples:

- Doing a migration to using Tailscale and an engineer claims it's done even though there is just one giant ACL for the whole firm

- Migrating from one monitoring system to another despite only 80% of the alerts have been migrated

- etc

Some of this is business folks creating bad incentives. Some of it is not creating good "success criteria" for projects. Either way, someone has to go through and make sure that both the details and the big picture deliverables landed correctly.

This being HN, I'm sure someone will say something like "just hire better engineers". I've seen phenomenal engineers make bad choices here due to poor incentive design.

A perfect example:

- you reward people for hitting delivery deadlines

- you punish people when there are outages

you might think you're pretty smart until you realize the odds of getting yelled at if you miss a deadline is 100% but the odds of an outage are <100%. The EV+ outcome then becomes to hit the deadline even if you know the code isn't ready.

Again, the job of senior engineers/engineering managers is to make sure these things don't happen by both double checking work and also pushing back on bad incentives.