Flipping anything to red entails significant legal and business complications. For starters you are basically admitting that customers deserve a refund for services not provided. Im not surprised that execs must be involved in that decision. You don't want random developer making a decision that could incur millions of dollars in potential loses when there are other strictly non-techincal factors to consider.
The point is more like "we better be sure of the scale of the issue before that is communicated publicly and low level dev's on individual teams do not have that 10000 foot view of the system".
You have all the power you need to make the company change its behavior. Vote with your dollar and move to a different platform. I'm sure you have recommendations to share.
Oh, what a pipedream. If only capitalism worked how it was described in textbooks. It turns out there are much easier lower cost optimizations businesses can perform based on managing perception rather than worrying about pesky concepts like utility.
You raise an interesting point. Where I work, most of our public status dashboards update to yellow or red automatically, with only a few failure conditions requiring a manual update. It’s always made me wonder whether we’ll ever get around to implementing capitalism with some manual update only dashboards.
Given enough law suits and mistakes by dev flipping dashboards to red with a bad code change or network provider outage and your org will have a manual public facing dashboard as well.
Of course, and such a thing would never take place in a system of economics where there are no consequences for taking accountability for failures. Because I’m sure such a system exists. Right?
With any customer that has SLAs written into their contracts, they're not just going off your status page. They most likely have a direct point of contact and exact reporting will be done in the postmortem.
The status page is for customers for which there aren't significant legal or business complications and exists to provide transparency. In my opinion you do want "random" people at your company to be able to update it in order to provide very stressed out customers with the best information you have.
As an industry we probably should recognize this more explicitly and have more standard status pages that are like "everything might be broken but we're not sure yet"
