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The Software Engineering Blame Game
Modern companies do everything to avoid assigning blame, but it’s actually a really good thing to do. Especially with developers.
In the modern Grand Game of Software Engineering it’s become gradually more and more likely that you will never, formally, get the blame for anything when things inevitably, at some point, go completely tits up.
As we’re the technicals we know when things go awry what happened to cause the problem, and if we don’t it’s a part of our core values and shared culture to find out exactly what happened, at what exact timestamp, and who clicked “OK” or tapped “Return” to make it so.
No-one likes a mystery, especially a software engineer.
As a direct consequence, a fair amount of ribbing goes on in the developer community and badges of honour¹ commonplace with such titles as “Achievement Unlocked : crashed a production server during Black Friday!”, “Wiped the SharePoint right in the middle of a corporate showcase!”, and “Erased all of the Docker containers, instead of updating them, on release day!”
We all also know someone who removed the system level French language pack, with the useful command “rm -fr /”. It’s just a part of leveling up as a developer, as mistakes are by far the quickest way to learn things.
