The cable provider / content provider dispute playbook:

1. Cease broadcasting / licensing of content

2. Talk to media to patiently explain how your adversary is responsible for depriving you of your precious {sports team | Marvel hero}

3. Hope ensuing social media / support queue shit storm hurts your adversary more than you (by the looks of these comments, advantage Disney)

4. Sign a deal

5. Repeat at next contract!

Liberal means progressive which means giving up individual rights while controlling the market to protect individuals from bad choices.

Two balls are a box. Neither are spinning. The box gets “shaken up” and the balls hit each other. We know that one ball is spinning clockwise and the other is counter clockwise because angular momentum spin is conserved. The balls launch far away from each other. We know the spin is entangled in that one is clock wise the other is counter clockwise but we don’t know which is which until we measure. How do we use that to communicate?

It can't be used to send a message because all you can do is measure your particle. Even if doing so changes the state of the other particle far away (which isn't really what's happening, but that doesn't matter), all the other person at the end can do is measure their particle.

Neither of you can choose what the state of either particle is. You have no control, so there's no way to transmit information.

What you can do is agree in advance that you will both take certain actions based on the measured state of the particles. There's no way to be sure the person at the other end actually does so though.

> - odds of being yelled at if you miss a deadline: 100%

> - odds of being yelled at due to an outage: unclear as it depends on the odds of an outage in general so let's say "less than 100%"

To reframe this, the odds of a dev having to crunch to hit a deadline they're behind on is 100%, but the odds of any developer catching a support escalation or on-call page from an outage are usually way less, especially on larger teams, because it's rare for every dev to always be on the hook for escalations. That's why things like goalies and pager rotations exist; the perception is that saddling one person with the responsibility occasionally is better than splitting it to everyone all the time. One weekend of abject hell a month is better than four weekends of annoyance.

But when any developer can shirk ownership of an outage, they all effectively do. Even from a support perspective, that doesn't even make me mad — who wouldn't want to sleep in, ignore Slack on weekends, and not feel dread every single time your phone pings with a notification?

On the other hand, teams _never_ let developers off the hook when there's a deadline that might slip. If you don't have something to do, you're pairing off to help someone else who does, or if you can't then you're more likely to be working on the next thing down the pipe so there's not as much deadline pressure, than supporting on stuff (like tests! and docs!) that won't be considered tech debt until someone (probably support!) hits something related to it and calls it out later.

Dedicated QA doesn't lift the outage ownership problem, it helps mitigate it before it happens. But QA teams that deflect outages struggle to provide data-driven reasons for their existence, because they can't track a negative, and credit for _n_ 9s of uptime is always split multiple ways such that nobody gets a big piece. QA winds up forever underappreciated because their wins are so much harder to count, but the times QA causes a deadline to slip are _always always always_ flagged.

Nevermind that outage response pulls engineering resources off hitting deadlines... so that becomes a self-perpetuating cycle...

The best route is to never have deadlines. Just convince sales and marketing of this and you're golden. /s

Many years ago I asked a developer which was a bigger deal:

- Having an outage

- Missing a deadline

They answered: "oh having an outage is WAY worse". I then asked: "if that's the case, why do you push so hard to hit your deadlines with code you know and I both know is probably not ready?"

They didn't really answer at the time but it eventually dawned on me what's happening:

- odds of being yelled at if you miss a deadline: 100%

- odds of being yelled at due to an outage: unclear as it depends on the odds of an outage in general so let's say "less than 100%"

Therefore, they are "gambling" rationally by pushing for deadlines vs pushing out good code.

The point I'm getting to is that if the goal is "hit the deadline" vs "deploy code that runs in production for two weeks with no errors", QA is going to be less of a priority.

Couple this with the fact that many firms think of QA as "they have to be cheaper than devs!" and then compensate them accordingly, means that QA people are fighting down both the comp front and the incentives front.

I've seen this happen so many times that I'm not really sure why people are surprised by it any more.

(NOTE: you could say "well then testing should be automated" but you get into a similar argument on who is building and maintaining the testing frameworks).

Many of these are absent in New York, including very visible homeless encampments, so no, these are not in “just about every big city”; many of these are specific to West Coast cities due to a failure in public policy.