Its Never the Customers Fault
One of the things that happen to engineers is that hard-working, productive engineers are often given leeway to make faux pas because of their contributions. Today, one of the engineers wrote on a public, widely distributed emails the following (paraphrased).
We suggested the aforementioned workaround to the customers. But since they cannot do it, we will have to do an emergency release instead.
There are two parts here. One, the engineer suggested a workaround that will quickly solve the customers. That is often the clever and helpful thing to do. The second part is that the engineer said on a public mailing list that they had to do something because the customer can’t do a workaround. This part is not ok.
We never blame our customers. Not publically. Not in an internal mailing list. Not in Slack. Just don’t do it.