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Comment by mfonda | Hacker News Reader

> There was no division of duties on the team. Everyone was responsible for the system as a whole. [...] Basically, I asked why he didn't take care of it. His response floored me.

> "Oh, well, you always take care of it."

I've found that it's almost never the case that there is no division of duties. Sure, there may be no explicit division of duties, but there is almost always an implicit division of duties. If Person X is always the one that handles Task Y, then the team will come to view Task Y as a duty of Person X. Other team members may then just simply assume that Person X will take care of it, or they may even actively avoid it to avoid stepping on anyone's toes.

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And that is the kind of low-touch crab pot[1] management practice that irks me.

I have to wonder if structure is actually evolving away, or if it's just a side-effect of the internet birthing so many businesses that management skills are rare in general so people just figure they might as well do without. I'm not nostalgic for the Mad Men era and rigid org charts, but there has to be a better way. If careers are just going to be one long Choose Your Own Adventure game, we all might as well go contract and freelance.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

This is my nightmare. Implicit division of duties are natural, but they should definitely be combated. Otherwise, things fall apart when people go on vacation, or worse, leave the team.

The way to do that is to have a communal backlog of work that people pick up tasks from, and to have an on-call rotation. Both of those things are rudimentary software engineering best practices nowadays. No one should be quietly maintaining things in their own corner. Situations like the ones described in the original post should be made part of on-call duties, or, even better, automated away.

"Too many cooks spoil the broth."

If a particular person typically handles it, trying to do it for them without explicit instruction that you need to because they are out sick or something can actively cause problems.

That practice is ok in many circumstances. People tend to fall into different roles. Personally, when I was an SA I loved the scripting and troubleshooting aspects of the gig. Support, even Dev support wasn't my favorite thing. But my colleague was the opposite, and we matched well.

If that workload becomes an inequity, the solution is to raise the issue and work on resolution. Shaming people and blogging about it feels petty.

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