I’m waiting to learn more details about what happened before I develop a strong opinion. But, when I see people rightly calling out prejudicial opinions, like the one Scott calls out here, it makes me want to say:
Based on my own experience, working engineering, this may well have been a case of “death by a thousand cut corners.“
Most people who work hard to get hired to a job want to be good at that job. When something this obviously bad happens, it’s most frequently because somebody above them told them their job is not worth doing well, despite all the hoops they made that person jump through to get that job.
Unfortunately, one of the most important skills in any job is learning how to advocate for the importance of doing it well, even after you’ve been hired to it. And even worse, I’ve heard anecdotally that a lot of people who got pretty good at this skill, where among the first chosen for layoffs.
At the end of the day, the best any of us can do is stop blaming individual contributors in situations where problems are more systemic. Those workers need help, not judgment.
![View profile for Scott Hanselman, graphic]()
Context - someone on the birdside are blaming #crowdstrike on DEI hiring
Here’s the thing folks. I’ve been coding 32 years. When something like this happens it’s an organizational failure. Yes, some human wrote a bad line. Someone can “git blame” and point to a human and it’s awful. But it’s the testing, the Cl/CD, the A/B testing, the metered rollouts, an oh shit button to roll it back, the code coverage, the static analysis tools, the code reviews, the organizational health, and on and on. It’s always one line of code but it’s NEVER one person. Implying inclusion policies caused a bug is simplistic, reductive, and racist.
Engineering is a team sport. Inclusion makes for good teams. Good engineering practices makes for good software. Engineering practices failed to find a bug multiple times, regardless of the seniority of the human who checked that code in. Solving the larger system thinking SDLC matters more than the null pointer check.
This isn’t a “git gud C++ is hard” issue and it damn well isn’t an DEI one.
