[benchaney]

I think this is pretty misguided. If reliability is at all important, you need controls in place so that a single person making a single mistake won't cause an outage. Software engineers are human and humans make mistakes. That's just the reality. That isn't indicative of a lack of trust, but rather an acknowledgement of the constraints we are operating under.

Its possible that people subverting these processes are doing so because there are some actual flaws in the processes, but generally it is just as likely that they are being lazy or just don't think there is any way they would ever make a mistake. That isn't to say that it isn't worth evaluating the processes and the tradeoffs they impose, just that I think you are definitely throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[lmilcin]

The most astonishing thing is that people actually believe that crap.

That the solution to people making mistakes is taking away any power to do anything substantial on their own. No power to do anything == no power to do any damage.

Think how a machine shop would work if we applied the same rules. "No, you can't use CNC machine because somebody broke an expensive part once. You need to fill this form, prepare this feasibility study and wait for director approval for every change to the program. Of course, director has absolutely no knowledge to validate your CNC routine but this is the process."

I worked for those organizations, just left one. You get hundreds of people do work that couple smart engineers without artificial limitations could do in a fraction of time.

[xboxnolifes]

Unless the CNC machine is the entire business, breaking a part isn't an outage. It's just an financially expensive mistake. On the other hand, if you have a building running life-support machines, you probably don't want someone messing with the breaker box that connects to them without designing some protections and backups.