HACKER Q&A
📣 newobj

Operational Peter Principle?


Phenomenon I've observed over the years, w/r/t to backend development/devops:

If you fix all the bugs that could possibly page you, then, by definition, you will only get paged by things you can't fix ("the network", undersea cable cut, data center explosions, etc).

This phenomenon feels like it needs a name, but I'm not aware of one. Is there one? What would you name it?

  👤 wmf Accepted Answer ✓
This is not entirely true, because there's an infinitely long tail of obscure bugs. Somebody from Google observed that they mostly have really crazy bugs like "cores that don't count".
👤 GianFabien
Contrary to the Peter Principle as applied to managements, what you describe is progressively higher levels of competence. It's like asymptotically tending to target SLA.
👤 warrenm
>If you fix all the bugs that could possibly page you

Then you need to either:

- add more features

- find bugs that "belong" to others, and work on them

- go work from beach

Or maybe all three :)