How can our language reveal the hidden cultural frictions in distributed software development?
Worst day ever
It hasn’t been a good Monday afternoon. A remote team checks something into the authentication service codebase that breaks the user profile service owned by your team. By the time the deploy is rolled back, customers haven’t been able to log in to your product for several hours and news outlets have picked up the story. The CEO is on the line, demanding answers. You send hasty apology emails to your customers, then sign off for the day, exhausted.
In the days to come, everybody has an opinion about what could have gone better.