What are the two honest alternatives to throughput police?#
Automate the check, or accept the risk explicitly. Leaving a person at the gate to produce an approval nobody treats as information buys the appearance of control at the price of real delay, and cheapens every other approval in the system. Change advisory boards show the pattern: the UK's financial regulator found CABs approved over 90% of the major changes they reviewed.
What should supervision follow instead of throughput police?#
The consequence and reversibility of a change. A large, well-tested, cheaply reversible change needs less supervision than a one-line edit on an irreversible path, and gates keyed on diff size get this backwards. Google's SRE rule for paging applies to approvals too: if a page merits only a robotic response, it should not be a page.
Throughput police are system debt at its most visible.