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Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

Even in a self-regulated/peer quality control context, I think it's quite amazing to not have people tasked for dedicated (or more focused towards) testing and QA, even within the software/engineering group.

I wonder how developer/engineers are expected to split their focus between design and development of their own areas of responsibilities, and doing peer review and testing of other people's areas of responsibilities. One of the dangers of this setup is always that people (and their managers) prioritize output of their own areas, resulting in neglecting testing and review of other areas. It's certainly possible to make the setup, but it takes good people (and team cohesion/morale) up and down the chain to make this work.

I definitely agree that it's a fine line.

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I’ll preface this with “I think I’m good people.”

Context switching is hard especially when understaffed and most certainly when doing different types of work. I’m still “executing” engineering projects, but I’m also performing inside sales functions, helping advance and maintain our dev systems, and now manage 2 functional groups. Unfortunately stuff does fall by the way side all the time.

Prioritizing things is key, but at the end of the day there is a capacity to what one can do. It takes good management skills to realize the capacity of the employees and when things need to change. Luckily for me I’m working with groups in all three of the areas I was working in to offload those extra responsibilities to other people so I can focus on what I’m supposed to be doing (managing).

It would be interesting to see how they operate.

From seeing this work and not work at different companies, I've decided at root it's a company culture issue.

Specifically, "How does my company deal with failure?"

Which is another way of saying "Are people disincentivized from telling the truth at my company?"

You can never have a process that requires truth-to-power as a regular occurrence that's successful in an environment where there are career penalties to speaking uncomfortable truths.

That's why legacy providers & government have engineered a system that accepts +50% wasted time, in exchange for not requiring truth because almost everything is checked and verified.

Good culture: We failed. I succeeded.

Bad culture: You failed. I succeeded.

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