Distributed decision making, and these are all systems that are transactional or regulatory and not necessarily driving revenue / customer value.

The IT / Systems team was told “stand up an SMTP server so we can send emails” and there’s no more discussion of capturing / trapping / dead boxes. And as an engineer if you start to add that scope, “why are you taking so long? I just need to send emails.”

And then the delete account project is “GDRP says we need to delete accounts. So delete them in the least expensive way possible.” Which means, as an engineer, don’t spend a ton of time on this. In my previous company, we were still manually deleting accounts. As in SRE connected to the DB and ran a SQL command, by hand, with a piped in user ID.

The notifications team is responsible for sending messages. Why do they care, or should be responsible for, identifying if a user is deleted? They’re responsible for maintaining the SPAM/unsubscribe list but not the user accounts.

it’s distributed decision making, no one cross-cutting or thinking about these edge cases that impact multiple systems