There are a couple of developers where I work who are in the habit of making public announcements when other people's bugs are found. They'll write it in a bug report: "I found these lines of code written by X", followed by the egregious offending lines of code. Or they'll announce it in a meeting: "Yesterday, I was working on a bug that had been assigned to me, but it turned out to be a problem introduced by Y's implementation of the foo feature."
Is this normal, common, or in any way productive? In my view, it is counter-productive: there's an element of public humiliation in it, where there doesn't need to be. And it does no good that I can see; rather it engenders a hostile and competitive work environment, whereas I prefer a cooperative one.
I am probably too thin-skinned about this, but it really grates on me. My gut reaction is to want to retaliate by publicly pointing out every bug made by these finger-pointers.
However, I see no reason to publicly call someone out on such a thing. Instead, I apply my default behavior to everyone equally. If I find something wrong in someone else's code, I fix it, and in the bug report, I'll write something like "the problem was in the implementation of foo in class Blah, where == was used instead of the equals method." If the person is still at the company, usually I'll walk on over to them, point out the problem, and ask if they agree with my solution, or if they want to fix it themselves. I don't do this to rub their noses in it, but because that's the way I'd like to be treated - I want to know when I've made a mistake, and be given a chance to correct it.
To be fair, the finger-pointers do, on rare occasions, point out bugs of their own making. So maybe they're just applying their own standards to everyone. Still, it seems like the standard (and friendly) behavior is to point out a bug, but not call attention to the bug creator. I wonder what motivates those who insist on playing the blame game.
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