alt Hacker NewsYour comment brings back the times I've been on teams that worked double the hours a full time job should be, or spent 18 hours in a data center because a migration/data transfer was failing, and, and and.
So many times it's taken herculean effort to make things happen, usually because of poor planning and poor leadership.
Why these are viewed as "successes" or "heroic" baffles me as well.
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Been there, done that. 100% agree with your take. The actual workers should be celebrated for the extra effort but the need of the extra effort should be seen as a failure. It always stops at the first part.
>Why these are viewed as "successes" or "heroic" baffles me as well.
Your source of confusion seems to be not recognizing that sometimes in life multiple things can be true at once. "Heroism" is generally about the actions of the individuals in response to a dangerous scenario, not how the scenario came about in the first place. "Success" is more overloaded, but can refer to both the overall system in place and the outcome of a given dangerous scenario, again separate from what caused that scenario to come about. This is near perfectly true in particular if, as is usually the case, the ones dealing with things on the ground are not the leadership. It may be idiotic, short sighted, lazy, inept leadership that lead to the problem (or it may simply be an unforeseen alignment of holes in the cheese), but if people on the ground go above and beyond to prevent the worst that's still heroic of them, personally. And if their efforts work that's a success. It'd be pretty strange to insist that the efforts of firefighters shouldn't be recognized just because somebody else did something stupid that resulted in a fire.
Yes, it's absolutely just as important what comes after. Ideally it's like the commercial aviation industry, where heroism on the parts of flight crews can be recognized and said heroism results in a top-to-bottom full systemic investigation and efforts to ensure that ideally nobody will ever be heroes in quite that way ever again. And have constant efforts to make sure heroism isn't ever required in the first place. The opposite extreme of some organization using it as an excuse for inaction and cheapness (at least until the day arrives when heroic efforts are not enough and a true disaster really does occur) is abominable. Even worse, because in that sort of utterly failed leadership environment the people on the ground will probably get scapegoated too.
But if employees, be they civilian or military for that matter, perform far beyond the call of duty why would that ever not be heroic?
Because it's cheaper to tell the team or company you're a hero and toss you a pizza and a day off than to hire enough people and competent leadership.
It's not a mystery, it's exploitation.
With all the business efficiencies we've made with computers as devs and IT, we should all be working 3 days weeks, instead a few people are so rich they can buy elections.