[hinkley]

I hate that the world sometimes requires a human sacrifice in order for change to happen. I can empathize with people that say this is a stupid way to fix a problem, but unfortunately the world is full of stupid things that actually work.

On one project, we had a horrible integration test system that required a human to read and interpret the output. The guy who wrote it made his own DSL. As we struggled with it, he noped out and left the project. The next guy had partly the right idea. He figured out how to translate the whole thing into Python with a couple of macros. So at least you could step through it. Then he noped out. Since I do a lot of CI/CD work and my primary goal on the project had already been fulfilled, I took over. What a mess. I made it better but I still couldn't nail down pass/fail statuses reliably. Pointless system.

I kept harping on how we needed to throw out the whole thing. It was a false sense of safety at best. When I left to work on something closer to my life goals, at the very last big meeting one of my people I'd been mentoring said, "The last 3 people to leave this team worked on this one project. Maybe we should get rid of it." and everyone started nodding. Son of a bitch.

Now, I wouldn't have stayed anyway, but someone else might have. I've seen other situations like this play out, and while there's always gonna be someone who 'takes their ball and goes home', often enough it's someone reasonably determining that they cannot or will not be responsible for the chaos represented by Option A over Option B. This will burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp.

[johncowan]

If you mean me, I am definitely not a human sacrifice. I walked away because I had had enough.

[hinkley]

That's what I mean. For this to be some place people like working, someone has to leave over the status quo. Which means they don't get to benefit from any of the work done so far or subsequently.