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240 points yusufaytas | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.476s | source
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galeaspablo ◴[] No.41894762[source]
Many engineers don’t truly care about the correctness issue, until it’s too late. Similar to security.

Or they care but don’t bother checking whether what they’re doing is correct.

For example, in my field, where microservices/actors/processes pass messages between each other over a network, I dare say >95% of implementations I see have edge cases where messages might be lost or processed out of order.

But there isn’t an alignment of incentives that fixes this problem. Ie the payment structures for executives and engineers aren’t aligned with the best outcome for customers and shareholders.

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1. sethammons ◴[] No.41895051[source]
The path to fixing this requires first measuring and monitoring it, then establishing service level objectives that represent customer experience. Product and engineering teams have to agree on them. If the SLOs become violated, focus shifts towards system stability.

Getting everyone onboard is hard and that is why good leadership is needed. When customers start to churn because bugs pop up and new features are slow or non existent, then the case is very easy to make quality part of the process. Mature leaders get ahead of that as early as possible.

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2. galeaspablo ◴[] No.41895102[source]
Good leadership is spot on! Agreed. The cynic part of me sees incentives that discourage mature leadership styles.

Leaders tend to be impatient and think of this quarter’s OKRs as opposed to the business’ long term financial health. In other word the leaders of leaders use standard MBA prescribed incentive structures.