The Tire Fire Pattern

The Tire Fire Pattern

In the real world tire fires are terrible things. The environmental damage caused by these long burning fires is long-lasting… When tires burn the release noxious smoke with ugly petrochemicals. When tires burn, they burn for years, for decades, because they retain heat even if you manage to put out a tire fire, it can easily re-ignite.

In software development tire fires aren't going to release noxious chemicals that will destroy local ecosystems, because software is composed of information, and as hard as I've tried, you cannot literally set software on fire.* Even if you could, the extremely small mass of data means that the methane off-gassing your engineering department creates when they've had too much pizza is a greater environmental concern than burning chrome will ever be.

How do we as software engineers secure the long term employment available to those with the expertise to be tire fire firefighters? How do we implement a tire fire in software, software consistently buggy enough that we're needed on nights and weekends to come in an fix flux capacitor problems? And more importantly, how do we get these problems to scale, so our engineering department can never hire enough firefighters?

The Tire Fire Pattern is a lot like the Big Ball of Mud, but the mud is also on fire

* DO NOT intentionally set hard drives on fire.