So my manager today asked me if I could stay later when there’s broken things in prod, and then today his star dream employee yolo’ed a full stack change into prod without review. It’s fucking massive and implements new API endpoints, touches >20 files. Many of the diffs are too large to render in the browser.
It’s almost comical, but something immediately broke.
Most of my day, I’m digging through code to identify bugs created from this shit, just to get a stealth merge midday.
I kind of don’t know what to do.
Pushing to prod without review and breaking the running application is a resume-generating event in many companies. In many others it’s not even possible because of programmatically enforced policies.
If your company’s response is not to prevent or dissuade it but to have other people work overtime to fix the mess then that’s a major management fail.
Try to educate your boss about best practices. This incident should give your arguments some more weight.
Deployment to prod should not be something a developer can do by themselves; a proper CI/CD system can be configured so that prod can only be deployed to by people with an appropriate role (product owners or lead devs if your company doesn’t have POs).
If you don’t have such a system, make it an explicit policy: Only Steve the lead dev (or someone specifically appointed by him while he’s absent) can push to prod; if anyone else does it they get invited to an uncomfortable meeting with Steve. If they do it again the meeting will be with HR.
But seriously, you should lobby for a proper CI/CD system (if none is present) and for the system to be configured so that a) you can’t merge to the main branch without a code review and b) deploying to prod only works from main and with explicit approval by a PO/lead dev. That should stop most of the shenanigans.