This reminds me of a story from India’s space program that I think about whenever I see orgs blame engineers for systemic failures.
In 1979, India’s first satellite launch vehicle (SLV-3) failed on its maiden flight. The project director was a young A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (who later became India’s President). He was devastated and ready to face the media. But ISRO chairman Prof. Satish Dhawan stepped in front of the press himself and took full responsibility for the failure, shielding Kalam and the entire team.
A year later, SLV-3 launched successfully. This time, Dhawan didn’t show up at the press conference. He sent Kalam instead, letting the team take all the credit.
Kalam said this was the greatest leadership lesson he ever received.
Now contrast that with Amazon pointing fingers at engineers for AI agent mistakes. These are tools the org chose to adopt, workflows the org designed and guardrails (or lack thereof) the org is responsible for. If your AI coding agent is producing errors that make it to production, that’s a process failure, not an individual engineer failure.
Good leaders absorb blame downward and reflect credit upward. What we’re seeing here is the exact opposite. That’s not engineering culture. That’s cover.
That is a strange (dumb) framing. It does read business as usual when people either get overloaded or get the opportunity to be lazy with things they don’t want to do in the first place but have to in order to earn a wage.
That person was unlikely to be the line employee, but rather the management chain putting pressure on engineering to "10x" their productivity by using it, and enforcing it's use as a part of that plot.
This reminds me of a story from India’s space program that I think about whenever I see orgs blame engineers for systemic failures. In 1979, India’s first satellite launch vehicle (SLV-3) failed on its maiden flight. The project director was a young A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (who later became India’s President). He was devastated and ready to face the media. But ISRO chairman Prof. Satish Dhawan stepped in front of the press himself and took full responsibility for the failure, shielding Kalam and the entire team. A year later, SLV-3 launched successfully. This time, Dhawan didn’t show up at the press conference. He sent Kalam instead, letting the team take all the credit. Kalam said this was the greatest leadership lesson he ever received. Now contrast that with Amazon pointing fingers at engineers for AI agent mistakes. These are tools the org chose to adopt, workflows the org designed and guardrails (or lack thereof) the org is responsible for. If your AI coding agent is producing errors that make it to production, that’s a process failure, not an individual engineer failure. Good leaders absorb blame downward and reflect credit upward. What we’re seeing here is the exact opposite. That’s not engineering culture. That’s cover.
What strange framing. Of course it's the fault of the person who decided to trust the AI with direct control over the production environment.
That is a strange (dumb) framing. It does read business as usual when people either get overloaded or get the opportunity to be lazy with things they don’t want to do in the first place but have to in order to earn a wage.
That person was unlikely to be the line employee, but rather the management chain putting pressure on engineering to "10x" their productivity by using it, and enforcing it's use as a part of that plot.
A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION
PEBKAC
PEBHAP Problem Exists Between Humans And Physics.
That problem is otherwise known as magical thinking, or in certain circles, Economics.