> If employees had ownership over which changes they think are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts back to zero before they take on new features or a new project.
You say this but as someone who's run a large platform organization that hasn't been my experience. Sure some employees, maybe you, care about things like bringing alerts back to zero but a large number are indifferent and a small number are outright dismissive.
This is informed not just by individual personality but also by culture.
Not too long ago I pointed out a bug in someone's code who I was reviewing and instead of fixing it they said, "Oh okay, I'll look out for bugs like that when I write code in the future" then proceeded to merge and deploy their unchanged code. And in that case I'm their manager not a peer or someone from another team, they have all the incentive in the world to stop and fix the problem. It was purely a cultural thing where in their mind their code worked 'good enough' so why not deploy it and just take the feedback as something that could be done better next time.
With regard to alerts, I have written software that daytrades stocks, making a lot of trades over a lot of stocks. Let me assure you that not a single alert goes ignored, and if someone said it's okay to ignore said alerts, or to have persistent alerts that require no action, they would be losing money because in time, they will inevitably ignore a critical error. I stand by my claim that it's what sets apart good employees from those that don't care if the business lives or dies. I think a role of management is to ensure that employees understand the potential consequences to the business of the code being wrong.
Yes, there was a recent story about (yet another) Citi "fat finger" trade.
The headlines mentioned things like "the trader ignored 700 error messages to put in the trade", but listening to a podcast about it.. its more like awful systems that are always half broken is what ultimately lead to it.
The real punchline was this - the trader confused a field for entering shares quantity for notional quantity, but due to some European markets being closed, the system had a weird fallback logic that it sets the value of shares to $1, so the confirmation back to the trader was.. the correct number of dollars he expected.
So awful system designs lead to useless and numerous alerts, false confirmations, and ultimately huge errors.
You say this but as someone who's run a large platform organization that hasn't been my experience. Sure some employees, maybe you, care about things like bringing alerts back to zero but a large number are indifferent and a small number are outright dismissive.
This is informed not just by individual personality but also by culture.
Not too long ago I pointed out a bug in someone's code who I was reviewing and instead of fixing it they said, "Oh okay, I'll look out for bugs like that when I write code in the future" then proceeded to merge and deploy their unchanged code. And in that case I'm their manager not a peer or someone from another team, they have all the incentive in the world to stop and fix the problem. It was purely a cultural thing where in their mind their code worked 'good enough' so why not deploy it and just take the feedback as something that could be done better next time.