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Why you've never been in a plane crash

asteriskmag.com

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Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#101

Post by dartos »

roenxi wrote: post #66
throwaway713 wrote: post #34

This concept of a blameless culture reminds me of one time when I was talking to a SWE at Facebook around 2010. I don’t know whether the story is actually true or just folklore, but apparently someone brought down the whole site on accident once, and it was pretty obvious who did it. Zuckerberg was in the office and walked up to the guy and said something along the lines of “Just so you are aware, it would probably t…

Someone get Zuck an above-average-manager award. But that isn't quite what you want in a blameless culture. The right response looks something like ignoring the engineer, gathering the tech leads and having an extremely detailed walkthrough of exactly what went wrong, how they managed to put an engineer in a position where an expensive outage happened and then they explain why it is never going to happen again. And a…

Describing my last company’s incident process exactly.

We’d have like 3 levels of peer review on the breakdown too.

Once there was an incorrect environment variable configured for a big client’s instance which caused 2 hours of downtime (as we figured out what was wrong) and I had to write a 2 page report on why it happened.

That whole thing got tossed into our incident report black hole.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#103

Post by sgjohnson »

petesergeant wrote: post #97
sgjohnson wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing fucking up with the 737 Max so much is merely a symptom. They so desperately needed it to remain a 737 so it wouldn’t be a new type and therefore wouldn’t need a new type rating was mostly because the airlines demanded a better 737. Yes, Boeing is at fault for the MCAS disaster (no redundancies, holy fucking hell), but in reality it was the entire industry. My point is, had nothing changed, it would have happe…

> in reality it was the entire industry Do you have further reading on this? First time I’ve seen someone suggest that Airbus has similar structural issues to Boeing when it comes to safety

I didn’t suggest that Airbus has similar issues. What I meant by the “entire industry” also includes the airlines.

I suggested that had nothing changed, it might have been Airbus that was low-key blackmailed into making a new plane that’s of the same type, with similar issues that would become evident only after a couple of crashes.

The very root cause of the issue was that Boeing was simply allowed to say “trust me bro, this is just a 737, it’s like any other 737, no retraining of any kind needed”, when, in fact, it wasn’t just the same old 737. Now this can’t happen anymore.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#104

Post by m_fayer »

ssl232 wrote: post #12

One of the most important pieces of legislation in the UK that helped improve safety in workplaces was the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, which placed a duty of care on organisations to look after the wellbeing of their staff. One of the tenets is to take near misses seriously. According to a health and safety engineer in a course I attended, near misses are like gifts from the heavens, as they show you exactly…

By this logic, the recent Boeing 737 incident should be considered a gift from the heavens. Which I think is actually a good way to look at it, though we don’t yet know whether this gift will be squandered.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#105

Post by m_fayer »

izacus wrote: post #33
josephg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the number of data breaches we see cropping up, I wonder if a similar law could be written to hold companies liable for the safe handling of personal data.

TBH having software engineer output in general be liable to some minimum safety, correctness and quality standard would be a god send for the world. But of course the developers will revolt against that.

The agile-peddling consultants and managers would certainly be the first to the barricades.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#107

Post by hkon »

manojlds wrote: post #78
hkon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's typically said to everyone at an all-hands meeting or similar, not to a single person. Delivering such a message personally to an individual is also sending another message.

It depends on the culture of the company.

No

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#108

Post by Jensson »

dustedcodes wrote: post #72
throwaway713 wrote: post #34

This concept of a blameless culture reminds me of one time when I was talking to a SWE at Facebook around 2010. I don’t know whether the story is actually true or just folklore, but apparently someone brought down the whole site on accident once, and it was pretty obvious who did it. Zuckerberg was in the office and walked up to the guy and said something along the lines of “Just so you are aware, it would probably t…

Whenever this happens to someone it's always a horrible feeling where one feels very guilty and ashamed no matter what people say to you and unfortunately mistakes like these are almost the bread and butter of any extremely experienced grey beard so it's kind of normal that something like this happens to someone at some point sooner or later. The only people who never make costly mistakes are those who were never tru…

> the cost which often gets quoted with those mistakes is not a real cost

It is still money they would have made that now weren't made. It is very important to explain to people how much value is lost during these events so that we also correctly value the work to prevent such events in the future.

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#109

Post by kqr »

Jensson wrote: post #108
dustedcodes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever this happens to someone it's always a horrible feeling where one feels very guilty and ashamed no matter what people say to you and unfortunately mistakes like these are almost the bread and butter of any extremely experienced grey beard so it's kind of normal that something like this happens to someone at some point sooner or later. The only people who never make costly mistakes are those who were never tru…

> the cost which often gets quoted with those mistakes is not a real cost It is still money they would have made that now weren't made. It is very important to explain to people how much value is lost during these events so that we also correctly value the work to prevent such events in the future.

You're comparing "reality where accident happened" to "an alternate reality where everything is exactly the same but the accident did not happen" and this is not a sensible comparison.

The reality we have produced the accident. You can't have that reality and have it not produce the accident, because it was set up to produce the accident. Proof: it produced the accident.

To avoid the accident, you need an alternative reality that is sufficiently different so as not to produce the accident, and some of those differences may well have resulted in lower profit overall.

(You may argue that you're able to set up an alternate reality that does not produce the accident and results in higher profit overall – that's a completely different argument, but it also requires you to specify some more details to make it a falsifiable hypothesis. Without those details we can not guarantee a higher profit in that alternate reality.)

Re: Why you've never been in a plane crash

#110

Post by mnau »

pintxo wrote: post #53
mnau wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define "minimum safety, correctness and quality standard"?

By having professionals agree on a minimal set, and writing them down?

So you propose no idea of "minimal set". If a liability is proposed, it has to be reasonably binary state: compliant/non-compliant.

Just like every time, there is no concrete proposal what constitute "minimal set". That's like "make education better", with no concrete plan. We can agree on goal, but on on the method.

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