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by mieseratte 3004 days ago
Two things:

First, it's generally best to praise publicly, and criticize in private.

Second, saying "@Users's commit screwed-the-pooch" blames but, frankly, may not be the whole picture. It's entirely possible that the commit caused the issue, but everything was done by the book in which case it's really an organizational failure.

Personally, I sympathize with your argument. I have no personal problem with Torvald-style correction. I used to work under an asshole who would threaten to have me fired routinely. Personally, I prefer the blowhards because you can always tell where you stand. Still, not everyone is wired this way and part of leadership is recognizing that and playing to various folks strengths and weaknesses.

1 comments

Right. Is the codebase spaghetti? Did anybody take the time to help Charlie understand the system? Were there unit tests that should've been broken by Charlie's commit? Were there unit tests but no continuous integration, so he didn't know to run those particular tests? Was there no code review where somebody could've caught the bug? Was there a code review but nobody else caught the bug? Was there QA testing performed where the bug could've been caught?

Etc. etc.