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.
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.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42580523