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by blaisio 2003 days ago
Hmm one thing that jumped out at me was the organizational mistake of having a very long automated "grace period". This is actually bad system architecture. Whenever you have a timeout for something that involves a major config change like this, the timeout must be short (like less than a week). Otherwise, it is very likely people will forget about it, and it will take a while for people to recognize and fix the problem. The alternative is to just use a calendar and have someone manually flip the switch when they see the reminder pop up. Over reliance on automated timeouts like this is indicative of a badly designed software ownership structure.
3 comments

We once found a very annoying bug which was caused because someone set a feature flag to a tiny rollout % and then left the company without updating it. It sat that way for 2 years before someone finally noticed.
What's insane to me is that a grace period is built in, but that the mere fact that this grace protection is active isn't a giant neon sign on their dashboards and alerts. I do see how it could slip through the cracks, since it was the reported usage that was wrong, not the quota itself.
I agree, and even if the grace period were a good idea, enforcement should have slowly ratcheted up over the grace period, rather than having full enforcement immediately after it expired.
This is also called a "time bomb". It's a bad thing.