Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lostcolony 3189 days ago
Not to sound patronizing, but you've clearly never worked in a large enterprise.

Teams are siloed. Code is siloed. The deployment process is siloed. Etc.

Do I know where the code lives? If I do, do I -have access to the code-? Write, as well as read? Will my checking in code trigger a huge change review process that will cause people to yell at me for touching code I'm not in charge of? Will my checked in code be picked up as part of what goes to prod? If not, do I have a way to get the code into that process? Etc.

Very few companies of that scale are just a "check the code out, fix it, create a pull request, and watch it work its way into prod".
2 comments
astura 3189 days ago
Not even a large enterprise, just anywhere there's any sort of formal process. Very, very few companies outside a startup with a single product+handful of employees are able to just make code changes like that all willy nilly. Especially to something as sensitive as authentication.

It's like saying "why didn't the NASA engineers just fix the o-rings on the Space Shuttle Challenger? After all, they knew there was problems with them and people's lives were ask risk." They did what they could, which was this: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/result-would-be-catastr...

link
lostcolony 3187 days ago
Well, you can have a formal process that allows contributions from anyone, which is what I was trying to allude to with "watch it work its way into prod". But I agree, generally speaking if you have a formal process, and you're not on the team, and/or can't convince a product owner of the need, there is no way to get it done.
link
blktiger 3185 days ago
I worked at Garmin previously which is definitely a big company. On my team I don't think I'd have had trouble convincing management that it needs to be done or otherwise been able to sneak it into other work. I'm concerned that as a profession we're too accepting of "well management won't let me do it" even when the consequences are high. To me it feels like designing a bridge that will collapse and kill people just because your manager said to.
link