[rmanolis]

System administrators are paid to wake up at night to fix things.

Ask your boss, "do you want your users wait until the next morning for the system administrator to wake up and fix the issue? Or do you want the software inform the user how long it will take to fix the issue in seconds and start calling the system administrator to wake up and fix it?"

Because you answer based on your preferences as a worker who wants to avoid the extra work to make the system perfect and not your boss's preferences.

[tharkun__]

I guess that settles it. You are conveniently ignoring the cases I described in which it makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever for your software to do anything about this.

And yes, there's an on-call person that does get paged when something happens that likely needs immediate attention. A page for every single time there's any error? Not bloody likely mate.

To pick up your last point: My boss is not in the business of paying for you, who will spend countless extra days building useless error "handling" for stuff that has already been handled and who is trying to get out of the responsibility of writing resilient software by paging someone else to "pick up the tab".

A "boss" never wants to pay for a perfect system. That would take way too long and nobody has figured out how to actually build that anyway (no, Odin is not the answer). They want to pay for the "slightly less than good enough" system, because that's cheaper and still gets the job done. And especially when I hear you talk here, I'm with them: Perfect is the enemy of good enough. We just have to ensure that it really is good enough and not less (coz many a boss will happily take way less than good enough if it gets them to market faster.