Is it good or bad practice to make developers pay money for his bugs?

I'm pretty early into my career as a developer. I'm also pretty ambitious in my independent learning and my ideas for improving the application I work in.

Many of my experiments are beneficial. Others are interesting. Some are authentically bad, but I learn from them. Occasionally I push new ideas that, at first inspection from my coworkers, pass muster and make it into production before manifesting issues. Usually these issues are minor. Once or twice they are more significant.

We have decent test coverage, a fairly regimented pull request review, and qa process. If I, or a coworker, commit some bad code we identify a failure in the process and discuss it.

The idea of being penalized monitarily, or shamed publicly, or being subject to any punishment or retribution for making mistakes in good faith is so unacceptable to me that I can't even imagine my reaction.

Is this a real thing that people do?

I could see it not being a complete disaster if it was a token amount paid into a team lunch fund or as an occasional fundraising gimmick for charity or something but no it's still a terrible idea. People have debts you don't know about, it'll turn most prospective new hires off on principle, and like you've noticed it sets cultural priorities in ways that don't do much to help team cohesion.

I've done an "I broke the build" trophy before. That's all in good fun though, less about shame and more memento mori -- it's coming to you eventually. Plus, everyone has the same goal: to ensure the current holder keeps it as long as possible!

Sounds like a terrible work environment.

We are human, not machines. Mistakes happen. The important thing is that you learn from them, and recognized where the failure came from and fix it for future iterations.

You learn from failure, not success - is one of my favorite motto's I've heard floating around.

I would agree if I get a share of the money my code makes.

Jokes apart, this is toxic. If we start grading devs for the code they write rather than the value they bring to the team and the project, then we're not moving forward, we're just writing good code that amounts to nothing.

I can't even comprehend this, so my two pence are simply: I would never work there.

It actually reminds me of Milgram's Experiment, at the least the blind experiment. "Shock some people if they're wrong".

It is one of the stupidest policies I can think of and only seems to be a way out of paying a bill.

If you ask a dev to add two numbers, most will present you with a solution. You'll have no bugs because complexity is so low.

If you ask a dev to do something that already exists they will probably use something that exists. You'll inherit all of the bugs of that thing (and there will be bugs in EVERYTHING regardless of if your team has the brains to find them).

If you ask a dev to do something that has never existed before they may use prior work to support that (thereby inheriting the bugs), they'll be specifying new domains (and there lurk bugs because it's by it's nature new and exploratory).

If you run a business with zero bugs, you're just too stupid to work with. Too Stupid to know there are bugs and edges and places your code, processes and staff won't be the right fit because no business or person has infinite resources.

If you strip your coders of revenue, which in my experience they spend managing health, psychology, CPD (because none of your budgets are that good). How do they meet your growing list of demands?

It's as much nonsense to remove money from someone you want to keep helping you as a physical attack on them. How can they help you when you're distracting them with other nonsense?

Even if you would prefer they left and you found someone else to help you, pay them. You couldn't walk to a shop as a reasonable person (please nobody highlight yourself as a cretin) to complain that the food you ate didn't measure up to your caloric or other needs.

In life sunk costs are those it's best to forget. Don't burn your money and encourage others to, trying to work out how to burn less money. Accept it's gone and look to move on giving actionable feedback, requesting deeper insight and perhaps involvement with process.

I will never apologize for bugs. I'll never feel bad I write them, and I'll always feel good when they are discovered because it's something else to keep my mind and wallet busy. Take away either my mind or my wallet and I'll go work elsewhere. I encourage other coders towards this too!

Any workplace trying to publicly shame people in any way with swear jars, penalties for bugs or anything like that, does not deserve any respect. I would never work for a company so badly mismanaged.

Two golden rules of feedback:

• Give praise publicly
• Give negative feedback in private

Also bugs happen to everyone, it's stupid to punish anyone, or even give them negative feedback for it. Hell it's stupid to waste time figuring out who to "blame" for it.

Just fix the bug, try your best to avoid the same bug in the future, and see if there's anything you can do to improve your processes and ways of working to prevent that class of bugs from appearing in the future.

Seek to learn, not to blame.

git config --global alias.learn blame

I would no say know unless its a contract type job, and even then probably not. People make mistakes, keeping it light-hearted is best I think for work. Fostering a pleasant work environment is important as turnover in software is pretty costly.

If a person is a common offender then they need to fix the problem or be removed. That and raises should reflect performance.

\m/

Hi Camilo,

While reading your other articles I stumble upon this post, and I have something to say on this as I had faced this in past.

My experience was not good about this strategy in past but it helped me to take important decision i.e to leave job.

While doing creative job like coding , bugs / errors happens , and to be frank sometime while working with new technology it happen a lot which gradually over time get perfected but only if a developer get a chance to improve skills, if the developer get penalized like this, developers thought get limited and focus on writing less codes and less scope the code to minimize bugs, I remember around 5 years ago my entire months salary get deducted due to this and which make me think to leave full time job which was the best decision of my life.

So accordingly to my past experience, it is very good practice if employer don't want developer to work freely and encourage developer to look for job somewhere else, and it's a bad practice of employer if employer want developer to work in peace.

Having said all that, I have also seen in some teams it's just for fun, those are fine, until if someone life and means of living not getting harmed, there should be no issue.

Hope I am able to express my past experience properly.