Error Culture

#omnivore state:: [[completed]]

What is Error Culture? It's inevitable that at some point a service 1 will fail. When that service fails you can either choose to be…

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Highlights

Additionally, if you’re getting error messages and nothing truly bad every happens, then a few things can happen:

People start to question ALL of the alerts. I mean, if this one isn’t valid, why is this OTHER one valid? Maybe I can ignore both 🤷‍♂️

You may be getting an alert about a small thing that can be ignored until it’s a BIG thing. I think this image does good job of illustrating the point (found here) ⤴️ ^59fc2e27

Error Fatigue

If you get 1000 alerts every day, you’re not going to be able to do anything about anything. ⤴️ ^cc840324

Lack of understanding of why the error is important

Related to the item above, but different, a person can receive an alert, but they don’t understand why it’s important. ⤴️ ^1e974788

Lack of understand of who the error will impact ⤴️ ^c62990aa

It could be that the error is unimporatnt for me, but HUGELY important for you. This is a case where the error is being directled incorrectly. If we both got the error you could see that I got the email and then ask, hey, are you going to do anythign about this? ⤴️ ^654838f6

Emphasis on Hero Culture

This is probably the worst of all possibilities. Some cultures tend to emphasize Heros or White Knights. They appreciate when someone comes in and ‘Saves the Day’. Sometimes people get promoted because of this.

This tends to disincentivize the idea of fixing small problems before they become BIG problems. I might be getting an alert about an issue, but it’s not a BIG deal and won’t be for some time. Once it becomes a big deal I’ll know how to fix it quickly, and I will. When I do, I’ll be celebrated. Who wouldn’t want that? ⤴️ ^1d9596be