[locococo]

I don't know that incompetence is the best way to describe the forces at play but I agree with your sentiment.

There is always tension between business people and engineering. Where the engineers want things to be perfect and safe, because we need to fix the arising issues during nights and weekends. The business people are interested in getting features released, and don't always understand the risks by pushing arbitrary dates.

It's a tradeoff which in healthy organizations where the two sides and leadership communicate effectively is well managed.

[sealeck]

> Where the engineers want things to be perfect and safe, because we need to fix the arising issues during nights and weekends. The business people are interested in getting features released, and don't always understand the risks by pushing arbitrary dates.

Isn't this issue a vindication of the engineering approach to management, where you try to _not_ brick thousands of computers because you wanted to meet some internal deadline faster?

[jimbokun]

You don't consider bricking a considerable fraction of the world's computers in a way that's difficult to recover from incompetence?

[locococo]

Maybe it is. I don't like the connotation of it though.

It implies some sort of individual failure when I think it's an organizational failure is what I am was trying to say.

[carapace]

> There is always tension between business people and engineering.

Really? I think this situation (and the situation with Boeing!) shows that the tension is between ultimately between responsibility and irresponsibility.

I cannot be said that this is a win for short-sighted and incompetent business people?

If people don't understand the risks they shouldn't be making the decisions.

[sealeck]

I think this is especially true in businesses where the thing you are selling is literally your ability to do good engineering. In the case of Boeing the fundamental thing customers care about is the "goodness" of the actual plane (for example the quality, the value for money, etc). In the case of Crowdstrike people wanted high quality software to protect their computers.

[carapace]

Yeah, good point. If you buy a carton of milk and it's gone off you shrug and go back to the store. If you're sitting in a jet plane at 30,000ft and the door goes for a walk... Twilight Zone. (And if the airline's security contractor sends a message to all the planes to turn off their engines... words fail. It's not... I can't joke about it. Too soon.)