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Comment by stormbeard | Hacker News Reader

Let's say there's a software tech lead and they've been code reviewing patches from a junior software engineer at your company. There are no tests, no CI to validate it, and it probably doesn't even compile... That tech lead approves that patch and that junior engineer deploys the code, taking down your site. Who is at fault here?

The tech lead. Sure, the system is broken to have even allowed this situation to occur, but the tech lead failed everybody by approving those patches.

This kid may have been absent and neglecting their studies, but the school kept promoting them to the next grade and didn't even attempt to take corrective actions by contacting the parent. They failed to do THEIR job and allowed for it to get to this point.

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Ok, except you're forgetting the CTO who doesn't believe in testing and will yell at the tech lead for wasting time writing them. And the CFO who won't approve budget for a CI system. And the CEO who just wants the feature pushed so he can sell it to clients whether or not it works.

The system is broken and in cases like these the school is put in an impossible situation. And remember this isn't just one kid they're trying to deal with: it's more than half of the student body. So the tech lead probably has dozens of junior devs constantly pushing code that he has to deal with.

You're probably right: the tech lead makes a nice scapegoat when a news article gets published that riles everyone up. Firing him won't solve the problem though.

this is spot on.

First, we're not talking about tech bros here. We're talking about a parent raising their child and being AWARE of what's going on in his life over a period of years.

>This kid may have been absent and neglecting their studies, but the school kept promoting them to the next grade and didn't even attempt to take corrective actions by contacting the parent.

Let's say all that is true. It's still the mother's fault. How could you raise your child and not know he is failing every class and skipping half the time FOR YEARS. Come on man, be serious.

>They failed to do THEIR job and allowed for it to get to this point.

What are you talking about? It isn't the school's responsibility to raise children. Schools are part of a huge government bureaucracy staffed by well meaning bureaucrats providing a particular social service. You, as a parent, CANNOT delegate the responsibility for raising YOUR child to them.

> Let's say all that is true. It's still the mother's fault. How could you raise your child and not know he is failing every class and skipping half the time FOR YEARS. Come on man, be serious.

One of the insidious things about this is that we've got an underclass that just doesn't understand at all how the basic systems of life work. How school works; how school can improve economic outcomes in the future; how to do basic legal and organizational things. They've also got severe lacks of attentional resources-- being poor, often in single parent homes, working high numbers of hours.

In turn, they produce another generation with largely the same impediments.

It's easy to blame the parent or individual actors within the system, but the system produces bad outcomes with costs that are borne both by the children and by society as a whole.

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