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GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team - Ian Duncan
(www.iankduncan.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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Programming
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Sounds about right.
I'm using GitHub actions at work because this place is extremely dysfunctional, and I can just add GitHub actions without it being a whole "research spike planning meeting impact analysis" six week journey.
I took it from "there are absolutely no checks and Bob broke the environment because he pushed up a change that's just invalid syntax" to... well, I couldn't make it block the build on failures but at least now when Bob breaks it again I can point to the big red X and ask why he merged with an error.
If you can get the permissions to do it set the protected branch and prevent merge on build failures. This is a repo setting that will work with any ci provider assuming it updates the PR status.
I thought about it but people are so sensitive here. If they broke something and couldn't merge they'd probably raise a big stink, and then there's good odds the checks would be removed "because they're adding friction" or some nonsense. My boss has already warned me about staying in my lane.
These people have never done any automated testing of any sort. No linter. No unit tests. And they don't seem to want to.
Time to look for a better boss
Well, yes, though my direct manager isn't the worst. He's trying to protect me from other teams that might get pissy.
One of my friends is a product manager type and his analysis was basically "if stakeholders don't care it's not a problem, even if by any reasonable metric it is a problem". So. Here we are.