Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

My memory is a bit hazy but it's a good story. At one place, there was some important order processing taking place. As is fairly typical, couldn't rely on getting all the required info. Or critically, getting all the required info correctly. Some extra data, slightly missing pieces but enough to work, etc. etc. Some could be pretty gross. We built validation to massage some inputs, modify processing, what have you to address as many of those as we could…

I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between non-technical management (who understands how to double click) and engineering (who holds the…

And the matching rule: badly designed projects that blow up end up getting a lot of attention and resources, their engineers end up looking like heroes. I remember the worst module of a very large J2EE website getting all the attention, got more developers, got 10x more hardware than planned... And in the end the lead was promoted. While several other modules did their work flawlessly and went unnoticed. This is what you get when business people make decisions on…

Several past submissions, only one past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820 - Jan 24, 2015 (50 comments)