I'm not sure if that employee fucked up. That may be company policy. Support people usually follow a script and they very rarely venture much beyond that. Partially because they lack technical knowledge and partially because it could actually get them in trouble. If I understand it correctly and you were calling your ISP at 6am, I don't think the person you were talking to was a developer. That said, I have no expertise in customer relations, so I wouldn't know if they were following good practices or not in that instance.
I get your point that people make bad decisions, but in software development, those bad decisions shouldn't break the user experience, but decrease the developer's (and/or the team's) productivity instead. Doing root cause analysis is part of the process to achieve that, as it can give insight on how to avoid that class of problems in future. That said, if someone is not doing a good job, they'd hopefully figure it out by themselves, but constructive feedback can also go a long way. Ultimately, if you have a good process in place, it should help you to make an educated assessment of who is underperforming (eg.: their PRs take very long to merge, they are full of beginner's mistakes, their code is never properly tested, their releases are always rolled back a few times until they get it right, etc). All of that without playing the blame game on the (hopefully) rare ocasion that a major bug is found in production.
To a user "The employee fucked up" and "Management fucked up" and "The developers fucked up" are indistinguishable.
Your blame-free production line won't help you if you're making the wrong thing and/or your UX doesn't help the user.
Example: someone at Google decided that if you make a general area-based query - e.g. vets in SF - street view is disabled.
It doesn't matter why they made that decision. To a user, it's an annoying inconvenience. The fact there may - or may not be - some kind of management rationale doesn't make it less annoying or less inconvenient. Nor does the fact that the code doubtless passes the tests it's designed to pass.
The same applies to Amazon's search options. I don't want to see results for 1.5TB external hard drives or any internal drives at all if I search for "external hard drive 12TB". I also don't want fake reviews, or reviews for unrelated products.
I don't want my own videos with my own music hit with fraudulent copyright claims when I upload them to YouTube. Especially if "my own music" is white noise. [1]
I don't want to have to deal with bugs like Heartbleed, Meltdown, or Spectre. I don't want Excel in Office 365 to fail to respond to double-click select. I don't want my card to be declined for no reason when I'm buying groceries.
I don't want the airliner I'm on to crash because management cut corners.
And so on.
Some of these issues are serious, some are less serious. But what's lacking is seriousness across the industry as a whole. There's an underlying attitude that software is either an annoying cost which can be pared to the bone, or a financial optimisation process, or an interesting puzzle to tinker with. And there seems to be too little deep understanding that it exists outside of a laptop screen, and when it fucks up it causes very real issues for very real people.
> Your blame-free production line won't help you if you're making the wrong thing and/or your UX doesn't help the user.
Blaming someone will not help either. As you said, the user doesn't care who fucked up.
Some of the problems you listed are still open research areas, so I wouldn't call not solving it lack of seriousness. And for the street view thing, given that there's no clear right or wrong, the best they could do is look at the data and see which approach seem to improve the user experience. I hope they've done that, but I don't know.
Then, there are bugs in excel, online shopping, aeroplane systems. Maybe those would be explained as a lack of seriousness, but I don't see how blaming someone would help avoiding those issues.
Finally, there's the recent intel/amd bugs. They were out there for a long time and it took quite a bit of time and ingenuity to find that there was a security flaw there. I think we can hardly classify that as lack of seriousness or understanding that it can have bad effects to people's lives.
This is probably going to come across rude, but I feel like it needs to be said.
nothing in your post was really relevant to this discussion. The fact that it may have been a company policy or that the person wasn't a developer is completely irrelevant to the larger idea. It's literally missing the forest for the trees.
I've been doing software dev for over 20 years and one of the things I'm known for is building very stable systems. Part of the way I do this is by not allowing myself to use these sorts of things as a defense.
When designing and/or building a system I ask: What should not be? Then I build the system to actively look for those situations. Put another way, I don't build systems with the assumption that there are no bugs. Too many developers push the responsibility outside of themselves. As if bugs are inevitable, therefore the fallout from bugs is inevitable. You just do a root cause analysis and move on rather than asking what you could have done differently to avoid the fallout.
I've lost count of the number of times systems I've built have actively refused to do something and then sent out a notification explaining why.
My point here is that you're doing yourself a disservice by insisting that root cause analysis should be enough. Yes it's important, but it's not enough. Some things simply should not be, and they're avoidable.
The problem is that many companies don't really care.
I don't think it's rude to point out someone is missing the point, though I can see why you're considering that given the overall aggressive tone of your messages. Let's backtrack, then. My main point is that scolding an individual for a problem in production is not going to improve the quality of the software produced by a company at all. Do you disagree with that?
Hm, then is your point that many developers become careless while programming because they are in an environment with safeguards in place to avoid screw ups?
I get your point that people make bad decisions, but in software development, those bad decisions shouldn't break the user experience, but decrease the developer's (and/or the team's) productivity instead. Doing root cause analysis is part of the process to achieve that, as it can give insight on how to avoid that class of problems in future. That said, if someone is not doing a good job, they'd hopefully figure it out by themselves, but constructive feedback can also go a long way. Ultimately, if you have a good process in place, it should help you to make an educated assessment of who is underperforming (eg.: their PRs take very long to merge, they are full of beginner's mistakes, their code is never properly tested, their releases are always rolled back a few times until they get it right, etc). All of that without playing the blame game on the (hopefully) rare ocasion that a major bug is found in production.