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Preparedness Paradox

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Re: Preparedness Paradox

#101

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

Test0129 wrote: post #51
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the curse of doing things right. You can't prove it was needed. You need to demonstrate that you are fixing genuine problems, or you will eventually be replaced by someone who delivers faster, even if there are subsequent bugs. One way to do this is to negotiate with the business in what needs doing, using risk. If you think there is a risk of a security or stability issue then you should be able to assess that…

While this works with rational actors the experience I have had in the industry is often the opposite. In fact, the company I work for now is probably the only company I've worked for in the last decade that actually correctly evaluates risk. The average corporate drone overseeing the engineer org is very typically the least rational actor in the entire org. Given the opportunity most start-up and mid-tier business w…

And that is as it should be (except the blaming for issues you raised).

The business should be able to choose what the priorities are. The business does not exist to produce beautiful code.

If a business wilfully disregards security or stability risks that they were informed of, and they get bitten, then they will almost certainly end up paying more to fix in resource and engineering time. But that's the trade off they chose to make.

If a business plays the blame game here, it's simply time to find another job. They are not going to be a good place to work at all.

Re: Preparedness Paradox

#102

Post by eastbound »

arcticbull wrote: post #54
eastbound wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing is a loss of time. It absorbs about 50% the workforce, and projects that don’t have it don’t necessarily suffer. Also, ask an engineer whether tests are complete, and he’ll always tell you that we haven’t tested anything yet. You need a cutoff at one point.

I think you're demonstrating exactly the fallacy that I identified. I know personally I've caught massive issues in my own unit testing of my own code - so I know for a fact it's not a dead loss of time. I'm also not sure why you think it takes 50% of the workforce - that's never been my experience. The trick is knowing what to test, how much to test it and how long to spend.

I make 600k ARR with software that has 5% test coverage (ie the clever parts to test).

And the one risk I faced was that I should have used React, because recruitment on this product will fail me i the long term.

Tests are only good for some situations.

Re: Preparedness Paradox

#104

Post by asdff »

izabera wrote: post #93
asdff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would depend on the context which often depends on what the real risk is. Building 5000 nuclear missiles? Overreaction. Overbuilding flood control systems such that the region has not experienced major flooding in 100 years? Justified preparation. The tell for what is justified and what isn't is through what you can remove from the system and not see any ill effect, like a jenga tower. We've already decomm…

>The tell for what is justified and what isn't is through what you can remove from the system and not see any ill effect, like a jenga tower. We've already decommissioned thousands of nukes and the sky didn't fall, so that goes to show all that preparation was useless. Bad example. It absolutely wasn't useless at the time to build those thousands of nukes. The whole concept of mutual assured destruction breaks down i…

Wasn't it unclear for most of the cold war how many nukes were even in play? As far as I understand the U.S. early on overbuilt nukes, assuming the soviets had a lot more of them at the time when they had hardly any at all. Then the soviets had to play catch up with the americans as you state, but once again it was all for nothing in the end for those nukes that were built, sat idle in silos, then decommissioned without seeing any use at all. If you have nukes for ten targets that would probably be enough to make a nation nonfunctional. Once the enemy launches their nukes, you launch yours and the world ends in 7 minutes. I can't imagine any nation would rise from the ashes having its 10 largest population centers annihilated. Personally I think the U.S. MAD plans of the 1950s-60s are absolutely horrific. "Mr. Secretary, I hope you don't have any friends or relations in Albania, because we're just going to have to wipe it out." The russians were not thinking along the same terms as the americans in terms of destruction.

Re: Preparedness Paradox

#105

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #101
Test0129 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this works with rational actors the experience I have had in the industry is often the opposite. In fact, the company I work for now is probably the only company I've worked for in the last decade that actually correctly evaluates risk. The average corporate drone overseeing the engineer org is very typically the least rational actor in the entire org. Given the opportunity most start-up and mid-tier business w…

And that is as it should be (except the blaming for issues you raised). The business should be able to choose what the priorities are. The business does not exist to produce beautiful code. If a business wilfully disregards security or stability risks that they were informed of, and they get bitten, then they will almost certainly end up paying more to fix in resource and engineering time. But that's the trade off th…

As an addendum, I've been on both sides of this argument. When I became the chief technical architect for a software company, I had to tell my colleagues to build a huge pile of crap to hit important commercial milestones and keep customers happy.

I pointed out that the total cost of doing this badly, then unwinding it and doing it properly would be at least double the total cost of just doing it right.

That didn't matter. We had to hit those goals. So that's what we did. It was expensive, buggy and kept us in business. My colleagues finally understood I had turned to the dark side :)

Re: Preparedness Paradox

#106

Post by objectivetruth »

asdff wrote: post #104
izabera wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tell for what is justified and what isn't is through what you can remove from the system and not see any ill effect, like a jenga tower. We've already decommissioned thousands of nukes and the sky didn't fall, so that goes to show all that preparation was useless. Bad example. It absolutely wasn't useless at the time to build those thousands of nukes. The whole concept of mutual assured destruction breaks down i…

Wasn't it unclear for most of the cold war how many nukes were even in play? As far as I understand the U.S. early on overbuilt nukes, assuming the soviets had a lot more of them at the time when they had hardly any at all. Then the soviets had to play catch up with the americans as you state, but once again it was all for nothing in the end for those nukes that were built, sat idle in silos, then decommissioned with…

No post body was provided.

Re: Preparedness Paradox

#107

Post by coreDNA123 »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roselyne_Bachelot

Excerpt from Wikipedia : In 2009, Roselyne Bachelot French minister for health back then [ordered 94 million vaccines from Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Baxter International for the French Government at a cost of 869 million euros (and an option on 34 million additional vaccines in 2010) to fight against the H1N1 influenza virus; however, less than 10% of French population (about 6 million people) had been vaccinated by the end of the winter. She later canceled over half the flu vaccines ordered to combat the virus, in an effort to head off criticism after reserving too many shots.]

This lady was pulled in the dirt for so long for this. This episode was politically exploited, she was deemed falling for pharmaceutical lobbying, being paid on the side for ordering that many vaccines. Only in 2020 she was praised for her action.

Excerpt from Wikipedia in french : [Retrospectively, her action was judged appropriate during COVID-19 crisis, when France ran out of Masks]

Re: Preparedness Paradox

#108

Post by adrianN »

asdff wrote: post #91
photochemsyn wrote: post #74

In the modern world, a good fraction of potential problems can be estimated using good computer models. Examples include building design parameters for withstanding earthquakes and hurricanes, river flow models for projecting potential flooding, aircraft design models that discover problems before planes start crashing, climate models that show the results of burning fossil fuels for decades, etc. Yes, many people do…

The problem is that lawmakers are rarely statisticians and are sometimes even the people not trusting the models because they don't understand them. Someone needs to write up a bayesian form of government and then take over a country.

I want to be in charge of the priors.
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