One morning, a colleague pings you — the entire production system has stopped. The team scrambles. After digging through logs, stack traces, and deployment histories, the root cause surfaces: a few lines of buggy code. And they have your name on them.
So who’s to blame?
The instinctive answer is you. But pause and trace the full journey that code took before it hit production:
A colleague reviewed your pull request and approved it
QA tested the feature and marked it as passing
A CI pipeline ran automated tests — all green
A deployment process pushed it to production
If the bug slipped through all of those layers, pointing at the person who wrote the code isn’t just unfair — it’s intellectually dishonest. The failure belongs to the entire system. And the only productive question is: how do we fix the system?
