Comment by throwaway0a5e

4 years ago

>You're suggesting that people bypass official procedures and/or laws in order to save time. This is a bad path to start down.

You are assuming rules say what they mean and mean what they say (and are even written where you're looking, and if they are that they're up to date). If it's your first week on the job, by all means, do the most literal and conservative thing. If it's not, well you should know what your organization actually expects of you, was is expected to be reported and what isn't.

There's a fine line to walk between notifying other departments when they need to be notified and wasting their time with spurious reports.

When maintenance discovers their used oil tank is a hair away from being a big leaking problems they just fix it because they are the guys responsible for the used oil and keeping it contained is part of their job.

Your bio lab or explosives closet isn't special. If the material is within your department's purview then that's the end of it.

Not every bug in production needs to be declared an incident.

>Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.

You can sling hypothetical around all you want but for every dumb anecdote about informal process breaking down and causing stuff to blow up I can come up with another about formal process leaving gaps and things blowing up because everyone thought they had done their bit. It's ultimately going to come down to formal codified process vs informal process. Both work, both don't. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.

>The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals.