91–100 of 361 posts
Why would you ever allow people to work 12-hour days on something so important? Grad student labour is cheap, surely trying to have one person do the work of two is a false economy.
On your next hospital visit for life-saving care, I'm sure you will be comforted to know that nurses (in the US) typically work 12 hour shifts and they're on their feet the whole time.
Really well written story. As a software engineer, I have a couple stories like this from earlier in my career that still haunt me to this very day. Here’s a short version of one of them: Like 10 years ago, I was doing consulting work for a client. We worked together for months to build a new version of their web service. On launch day, I was asked to do the deployment. The development and deployment process they had…
We rarely interact directly with production databases as we have an event sourced architecture. When we do, we run a shell script which tunnels through a bastion host to give us direct access to the database in our production environment, and exposes the standard environment variables to configure a Postgres client.
Our test suites drop and recreate our tables, or truncate them, as part of the test run.
One day, a lead developer ran “make test” after he’d been doing some exploratory work in the prod database as part of a bug fix. The test code respected the environment variables and connected to prod instead of docker. Immediately, our tests dropped and recreated the production tables for that database a few dozen times.
Really well written story. As a software engineer, I have a couple stories like this from earlier in my career that still haunt me to this very day. Here’s a short version of one of them: Like 10 years ago, I was doing consulting work for a client. We worked together for months to build a new version of their web service. On launch day, I was asked to do the deployment. The development and deployment process they had…
Your excellent story compelled me to share another: We rarely interact directly with production databases as we have an event sourced architecture. When we do, we run a shell script which tunnels through a bastion host to give us direct access to the database in our production environment, and exposes the standard environment variables to configure a Postgres client. Our test suites drop and recreate our tables, or t…
if strings.Contains(dbname, "prod") {
panic("Refusing to wipe production database!")
}
Truncate(db)Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that they won't make the same mistake again
I guess the idea is that if the problem was incompetency they will find some other way to mess up as opposed to a genuine mistake made by a competent person.
Are you suggesting that a competent person never messes up/makes a mistake?
The most fundamental part of life is learning from mistakes, and today even AI is starting to do this. Mistakes and evolution are what _make us_ human and living.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aerospace-grade connectors are specifically designed to support multiple keyings that prevent this kind of thing. It's definitely a problem preventable by careful design if the interface supports making this kind of mistake.
Can confirm. Source: I used to work for NASA, and I'm a private pilot. There are literally millions of electrical connections that get made on aircraft and spacecraft on a regular basis and I can't think of ever hearing of an incident caused by one of them being made backwards. (Now, mechanical connections getting made backwards is not unusual. That's why you check to make sure that the flight control surfaces move i…
Like say they have one that is setup to test the motor driver circuitry and another one that is setup to test the motor?
Or say the breakout box intentionally has both sides of the connection on it, so that you can get in-between the driver and motor?
A cautionary lesson in properly checking how exactly events are connected during an incident. Easy to look at two separate signals and assume they must be causal in a particular direction, when in reality it is the other way around.
Why would you ever allow people to work 12-hour days on something so important? Grad student labour is cheap, surely trying to have one person do the work of two is a false economy.
Then such people are doing the "actual work" and overloaded with tasks, working overtime is a rule rather than the exception. The justification for this is that he was "getting experience" for trying to move up in his career. So all good.
Most people are going to remember that he messed up, rather than that he was working overtime to meet expectations, maybe except for the guy that pat him in his shoulder, he saw enough to understand it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Health care professionals is a weird one, because while long shifts are dangerous, patient handover is also dangerous and there may be an argument that longer shifts means fewer handovers which could result in better patient outcomes.
They do know roughly how long it takes to take care of a patient & should be set up with overlapping shifts and to be winding down towards a normal shift (i.e. no new patients) so that there's no handoff of a single patient but no one is working long hours. Some patients might take longer than a single shift, but handoff is inevitable at some point. You can improve your handoff processes but you can't improve the dec…