Thanks for saying this. This mindset has infiltrated all the engineering teams and made software development hell for those of us who actually like shipping. Being more careful, adding more checks and processes, has exponentially less returns (just invert the graph). Somehow though, teams have been lead to believe that each incident needs to be responded with more processes.
This is an even bigger problem putside of our profession. Organisations do everything in their power to reduce the agency of employees and the general public through process. A company would rather spend 20 hours verifying a purchase than allow an unnecessary purchase every now and then. German culture in particular seems to favour this to an extreme.
I've worked in highly autonomous and empowered teams that still root cause-analyzed every incident to death. The rationale being that if you'd get PagerDuty-ied in the middle of the night, it better be worth losing your sleep over. And it was great. I've also worked in slow, bureaucratic environments. They're not the same. Turning the magic dial (up) towards "more care" apparently doesn't move you along the same axis towards bureaucracy per se.
I like the German workplace (to white collar job) for several reasons but this one is one that drives me away.
We used to have an issue of deployments breaking in production, and one of the reasons was that we did not have some kind of smoke test in the post deployment (in our case we only had a rolling update as a strategy).
The rational solution was only create that post-deployment step. The solution that our German managers demanded: cut access to deployment for the entire team, “on-call” to check the deployments, and a deployment spreadsheet to track it.
In my experience it’s a cultural problem in Germany. Everything has to be done methodically, even if the method adds a disproportionate amount of friction. Often, the purported benefits are not even there. The thoroughness is full of holes, the diligence never done, the follow-ups never happening.
It leads to situations where you need a certificate from your landlord that you take to the certified locksmith that your landlord contracted and show a piece of ID to order a key double that arrives 3 business days later at a cost of 60€. A smart German knows that there’s a locksmith in the basement of a nearby shopping mall that will gladly duplicate any key without a fuss, but even then the price is inflated by the authorised locksmiths.
I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. Everything is like this. Every time I think “it can’t really be this ridiculous, I’m being uncharitable”, a colleague has a story that confirms that the truth is even more absurd.
It’s funny until you realise the cost it has for society at large. All the wasted labour, all the bottlenecks, and little to show for it.
> Thanks for saying this. This mindset has infiltrated all the engineering teams and made software development hell for those of us who actually like shipping. Being more careful, adding more checks and processes, has exponentially less returns (just invert the graph).
I'm going to strongly disagree with this (when it's done well, not bureaucratically).
We review what can be improved due to problems and we incorporate it into our basic understanding of everything we do, it's the gaining of experience and muscle memory to execute fast while also accounting for things proactively.
It's a long term process but the payoff is great. Reduced time+effort on problems after the fact ends up long term increasing amount of valuable work produced.
When Grandpa was 20 years old he left the house and forgot to take his keys, so every time he left the house he checked his pockets for his keys.
When he was 24 he left the house and left the stove on. He learned to check the stove before leaving the house.
When he was 28 he left his wallet at home. He learned to check for his wallet.
...
Now Grandpa is 80. His leaving home routine includes: checks for his keys, his phone, his wallet. He ensures the lights are off, the stove is off, the microwave door is closed, the iron is off, the windows are closed in case it rains...
Grandpa has learned from his mistakes so well that it now takes him roughly an hour to leave the house. Also, he finds he doesn't tend to look forward to going out as much as he once did...
In response to this, I'd like to highlight what I wrote:
> We then need to lean on data and experience of what the trade offs of those changes would be.
As engineering leaders, this is a key part of our job. We don't just blindly add processes to prevent every issue. I should add that we also need to analyse our existing processes to see what should change or is not needed any more.
