| > Pre-live environments are never at parity with production Same with your laptops... and this is only true if you make it that way. Using things like Docker containers eliminates some of the problem with this too. > There’s always a queue This has never been a problem for any of the teams I've been on (teams as large as ~80 people). Almost never do they "not want your code on there too". Eventually it's all got to run together anyway. > Releases are too large This has nothing to do with how many environments you have, and everything to do with your release practices. We try to do a release per week at a minimum, but have done multiple releases in a single day as well. > Poor ownership of changes Code ownership is a bad practice anyway. It allows people to throw their hands up and claim they're not responsible for a given part of the system. A down system is everyone's problem. > People mistakenly let process replace accountability Again - nothing to do with your environments here, just bad development practices. |
Agreed with a lot of what you said up until this - this is, frankly, just completely wrong. If nobody has any ownership over anything, nobody is compelled to fix anything - I've experienced this first-hand on multiple occasions.
There have also been several studies done to refute your point - higher ownership correlates with higher quality. A particularly well-known one is from Microsoft, which had a follow up study later that attempted to refute the original findings but failed to do so. Granted, these were conducted from the perspective of code quality, but it is trivial to apply the findings to other scenarios that demand accountability.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Whoever sold you on the idea that ownership of _any and all kinds_ is bad would likely rather you be a replaceable cog than someone of free thought. I don't know about you, but I take pride in the things I'm responsible for. Most people are that way. I also don't give two shits about anything that I don't own, because there's not enough time in the day for everyone to care about everything. This is why we have teams in the first place.
There is a mile of difference between toxic and productive ownership - Gatekeepers are bad, custodians are good.