The Bystander Effect: Why No One Helps in Emergencies
A critical bug crashed our production system at 2 AM. Slack notifications went out to the entire engineering team—thirty developers. Nobody responded. Not for 45 minutes. Everyone saw the alerts. Everyone assumed someone else would handle it. After all, with thirty people notified, surely someone more senior, more experienced, or more available would jump in. When I finally woke up and fixed it, I found out that seventeen people had been awake and seen the alert. Each one thought, “Someone else will get this.” ...