When a production bug arises, dev, reviewer, and QA play Spider-Man blame
Description
Classic Spider-Man pointing meme: three identical cartoon Spider-Man characters in a warehouse backdrop of dull reds and greys, each standing in a triangle and pointing accusingly at the others. Overlaid white bold text labels the left character "DEV", the center character "DEV WHO APPROVED PR", and the right character "QA". Wooden crates and a partially open loading-bay door fill the scene while flat comic colors emphasize the identical costumes. The meme humorously depicts the post-deployment blame cycle in which the original developer, the peer who merged the pull request, and the quality-assurance engineer each deny responsibility for a defect that slipped through code review and testing, highlighting real-world tensions in code-review workflows and QA processes
Comments
14Comment deleted
Our RCA went full Paxos - no consensus on the fix, but the blame got safely replicated to three identical nodes
The best part about this scenario is everyone's git blame output mysteriously shows commits from 'Former Employee' who left six months ago, and the PR was approved with a single '👍' emoji at 4:59 PM on a Friday
The PR said 'LGTM' - and to be fair, it did look good; nobody claimed it was read
The real bug here is the circular dependency in the blame graph. Classic O(n²) finger-pointing complexity where n is the number of people who touched the code. In a truly mature engineering culture, this would resolve to a blameless postmortem - but let's be honest, we've all been at least one of these Spider-Men when that critical bug makes it past three layers of 'LGTM' and straight into production on a Friday afternoon
LGTM is not a test; it’s our distributed blame protocol
In our org, responsibility uses eventual consistency - DEV, reviewer, and QA all converge on pointing at each other while the bug serves traffic
Classic Byzantine Generals: four nodes, zero consensus on who shipped the bug
Nope. Dev should always be mostly responsible. Comment deleted
You sound like an irresponsible QA Comment deleted
Nice try. But no, I'm a shitty dev. Comment deleted
The most responsibility should be on the one who actually broke something, not on the one supposed to control that. Comment deleted
I don't think so. QA is literally getting paid to do that. Comment deleted
I agree but the QA cannot possibly think what you were thinking when you wrote that code Comment deleted
Depends whether it's "doesn't implement feature correctly" bad or "breaks unrelated things across whole project" bad. Comment deleted