<story><title>If you succeed you will fail</title><url>https://boyter.org/posts/if-you-succeed-you-will-fail/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>don-code</author><text>As an engineer, I&amp;#x27;ve never personally understood the desire to release anyway, even when a system has known critical deficiencies like this one. Sure, perfect is the enemy of good, but I&amp;#x27;d also argue that inoperable is the enemy of good - it only serves to erode trust in your product, if your team chose to release an unusable product.&lt;p&gt;Some years ago, I worked on a system not quite as bad as what the author described, but close. We released a new product with a known, quite bad security vulnerability (I&amp;#x27;d made sure our product team was _extremely_ aware of this), as well as no monitoring to speak of. The deadline had been communicated for around one year, but nobody had ever really discussed the significance of the date, other than it was what we were all death-marching to, and we needed to deliver.&lt;p&gt;What did that date turn out to be? The head of product management&amp;#x27;s birthday, which was revealed to the rest of the company on the highly-celebrated the launch date. People were just kissing ass. I left several months later.&lt;p&gt;It feels unconscionable to me that a company could have launched an incomplete, insecure, customer-facing product just to give a birthday gift to a leader, but I suspect this sort of thing is common.</text></comment>
<story><title>If you succeed you will fail</title><url>https://boyter.org/posts/if-you-succeed-you-will-fail/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ttr2021</author><text>&amp;quot;Fall back on blaming the process when failure comes around and avoid ever pointing fingers or owning it.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Some organisations can do this, but I&amp;#x27;ve see plenty that might outwardly try to avoid pointing fingers, but you can tell that despite warnings given, they do blame.&lt;p&gt;I told several leaders that one of their systems was literally on the brink and we were fighting fires on it every other day, and the processes in place were horribly broken.&lt;p&gt;12 months later shit hit the fan, my feedback was that I wasn&amp;#x27;t proactive enough, and they basically threw me and my team under the bus.&lt;p&gt;This despite budget under cutting, limits in hiring, enormous optimisation, education of other teams, research. Just getting &amp;#x27;No&amp;#x27; or no real outcomes all the time on any escalation.&lt;p&gt;The leaders did this serially across the business, and lacked ownership on this aspect to even give people the resources and autonomy to do anything about it, yet would come looking when it came time, to throw other teams under the bus like this</text></comment>