- "and our “lean” team is more a product of our inability to identify and hire great engineers, rather than an insistence on superhuman efficiency."
Can we all at some point have a serious discussion on hiring and training. It seems that many teams are unstaffed or at least not satisfied with the quality and quantity of their team. Why is that? Why does it seem to be the norm?
- what about mitigating bugs in the first place? Shouldn't someone be assigned to that? Yeah, sure, bugs are a given. They are going to happen. But in production bugs are something real and paying customers shouldn't experience. At the very least what about feature flags? That is sonething new is introduced to a limited number of user. If there's a bug and it's significant enough, the flag is flipped and the new feature withdrawn. Then the bug can be sorted as someone is available.
Prehaps the profession just is what it is? Some teams are almost miraculously better than others? Maybe that's luck, individuals, product, and/or the stack? Maybe like plumbers and shit there are just things that engineering teams can't avoid? I'm not suggesting we surrender, but that we become more realistic about expectations.