When you’re coding as part of a team blaming individuals isn’t helpful. For starters, any code should have gone through at least one level of code review, so there’s been multiple sets of eyes on it before it causes trouble. Better to learn from mistakes as a team so everyone gets the benefit of hindsight.
From this, I feel like “accountability” has started to mean being blamed and berated.
That’s not what I consider to be accountability and is something I simply consider a waste of time, no matter whether it is a personal or a team thing.
nobody said anything about blaming anyone. Having individual accountability means literally having the ability to do your daily job, such as finishing a ticket you say you’re going to finish, following up if you have a delay, working to create meetings if you need meetings, reaching out if you need help. It has nothing to do with if something goes wrong. Where did you get that idea? and like I said below:
so yeah it’s pretty dang clear it’s a joke. same for code ownership, tasks for testing or refactoring, design and architecture reviews. The joke is that it’s stuff that people love to hate on and then it gets increasingly more ridiculous until it’s stuff that you most definitely want to hire for doing/having.
This may just be a terminology mismatch. I would consider the tasks you’ve mentioned to just be part of your day-to-day work, and yes, if you’re not doing those you can expect to be pulled up by your line manager/pm/whoever’s running the show. I usually see accountability talked about in terms of the quality and timeliness of the deliverable. If your team’s deliverable isn’t on time, it’s not because developer ‘A’ failed to deliver their ticket on time, it’s because the team as a whole didn’t manage their resources appropriately, didn’t spot the slippage and didn’t adjust or escalate the issue in time. If there’s a bug in the code, it’s not because developer ‘B’ forgot a bounds check, it was down to the whole team to ensure the quality of the deliverable, probably via code review.
Holding the individual solely responsible for this sort of thing is counterproductive, as it tends to lead to people trying to cover up mistakes, which rarely goes well, and means others don’t get a chance to learn from it.
None of which is to say that the indivuduals shouldn’t be held to the quality of their work. If the work they’re delivering consistently isn’t up to scratch, whether that’s found through code review or a bug report, they first need help to improve, and only if that doesn’t work should they face the inevitable consequences.
I would consider the tasks you’ve mentioned to just be part of your day-to-day work
I mean, that’s the joke… just like doing code reviews is literally part of your everyday work. The joke is that the first few things are things that are very divisive and then they get increasingly more ridiculous including individual accountability and code ownership. In regards to the rest of your post, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that called “individual accountability”. Individual accountability is exactly what it says in the dictionary:
the fact of being responsible for what you do and able to give a satisfactory reason for it, or the degree to which this happens:
There were furious demands for greater police accountability.
Accountability is important these days, and managers aren’t always willing to adopt risky strategies.
a situation in which someone is responsible for things that happen and can give a satisfactory reason for them:
The organization suffers from a lack of accountability.
greater/increased/more accountability The public has been demanding greater accountability from lawmakers.
If the people around you are using accountability in the way you described, then they’re just morons who make up shit.
When you’re coding as part of a team blaming individuals isn’t helpful. For starters, any code should have gone through at least one level of code review, so there’s been multiple sets of eyes on it before it causes trouble. Better to learn from mistakes as a team so everyone gets the benefit of hindsight.
From this, I feel like “accountability” has started to mean being blamed and berated.
That’s not what I consider to be accountability and is something I simply consider a waste of time, no matter whether it is a personal or a team thing.
I do use
blameandreflogthough.I keep reading ref-log as re-flog.
Get on with the reflogging.
nobody said anything about blaming anyone. Having individual accountability means literally having the ability to do your daily job, such as finishing a ticket you say you’re going to finish, following up if you have a delay, working to create meetings if you need meetings, reaching out if you need help. It has nothing to do with if something goes wrong. Where did you get that idea? and like I said below:
This may just be a terminology mismatch. I would consider the tasks you’ve mentioned to just be part of your day-to-day work, and yes, if you’re not doing those you can expect to be pulled up by your line manager/pm/whoever’s running the show. I usually see accountability talked about in terms of the quality and timeliness of the deliverable. If your team’s deliverable isn’t on time, it’s not because developer ‘A’ failed to deliver their ticket on time, it’s because the team as a whole didn’t manage their resources appropriately, didn’t spot the slippage and didn’t adjust or escalate the issue in time. If there’s a bug in the code, it’s not because developer ‘B’ forgot a bounds check, it was down to the whole team to ensure the quality of the deliverable, probably via code review.
Holding the individual solely responsible for this sort of thing is counterproductive, as it tends to lead to people trying to cover up mistakes, which rarely goes well, and means others don’t get a chance to learn from it.
None of which is to say that the indivuduals shouldn’t be held to the quality of their work. If the work they’re delivering consistently isn’t up to scratch, whether that’s found through code review or a bug report, they first need help to improve, and only if that doesn’t work should they face the inevitable consequences.
I mean, that’s the joke… just like doing code reviews is literally part of your everyday work. The joke is that the first few things are things that are very divisive and then they get increasingly more ridiculous including individual accountability and code ownership. In regards to the rest of your post, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that called “individual accountability”. Individual accountability is exactly what it says in the dictionary:
If the people around you are using accountability in the way you described, then they’re just morons who make up shit.