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Normalization of Deviance (2015)

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Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#121

Post by strbean »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #51
chaps wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We weren't able to reliably install security daemons on a client's machine because the entire automation system didn't account for autoscaling. The issues were raised well before I joined and the project head legitimately didn't understand it as a problem that needed solving. The hosts were for a presidential candidate's webserver, and they noticed the webservers were missing security daemons days before the election…

Maybe I'm missing a joke, but was your client HRC's campaign?(?!)

Did HRC's campaign website get hacked? I know her mailserver was hacked, but that was when she was secretary of state, no?

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#122

Post by PaulHoule »

Ensorceled wrote: post #44
GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you cannot change an organization's culture with rules, mission statements, listing values, or giving speeches. They only way is to take down the old culture bearers. Some of them may be managers, but more often they are employees who have gained some organizational power. You'll often find them at the center of sticky organizational spider webs with approval processes such as purchasing and service…

> They only way is to take down the old culture bearers. ... To change the culture, these people have to go. I was briefly head of engineering at a company that had several "old culture bearers" that made change impossible. I was something like the 3rd or 4th engineering leader over the space of a year. Apparently the person after me was actually allowed to fire a few of these people and was able to turn things aroun…

More than once I had to leave in order for an employer to take action against a problem employee, including my boss once. In these cases the employer suddenly realized that it made no sense to attempt to replace me without removing the reason that drove me out.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#123

Post by outworlder »

chaps wrote: post #21
aliqot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I never understood about this story; did you guys have any suspicion it would dump radiation into the patient all at once, or was this like a concurrency bug

We weren't able to reliably install security daemons on a client's machine because the entire automation system didn't account for autoscaling. The issues were raised well before I joined and the project head legitimately didn't understand it as a problem that needed solving. The hosts were for a presidential candidate's webserver, and they noticed the webservers were missing security daemons days before the election…

> security daemons

AKA compliance checkbox crap?

If infrastructure is immutable (which makes it work even better for autoscaling), nothing new will get installed unless you build a new image. Export whatever data you require to ensure things you want to be running are running. Monitor entry and exit points.

What is left for the "security deamons" to do?

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#124

Post by rr888 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I like the bit about Let's look at how the first one of these, “pay attention to weak signals”, interacts with a single example, the “WTF WTF WTF” a new person gives off when the join the company. and kinda wonder if a company that prioritized not getting this reaction from new hires might find it is the most impactful thing they can do in terms of culture.

The problem is when you join a high performing team and organization. Is a WTF something they should fix your you need to recalibrate what you think is normal?

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#125

Post by [deleted] »

whats_a_quasar wrote: post #95
aliqot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I never understood about this story; did you guys have any suspicion it would dump radiation into the patient all at once, or was this like a concurrency bug

Huh? Are you assuming that the parent comment is about someone programming a medical device?

[deleted]

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#126

Post by lifeisstillgood »

whats_a_quasar wrote: post #95
aliqot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I never understood about this story; did you guys have any suspicion it would dump radiation into the patient all at once, or was this like a concurrency bug

Huh? Are you assuming that the parent comment is about someone programming a medical device?

I'm think it's a meta joke - Therac-25 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) was a radiotherapy machine from the early 1980s and is (in)famous for having software failed and killed I think dozens of people. It's become a well known case study, but it's highly unlikely anyone on HN worked on it - I think that's the joke.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#127

Post by 908B64B197 »

jkaptur wrote: post #38
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I like the bit about Let's look at how the first one of these, “pay attention to weak signals”, interacts with a single example, the “WTF WTF WTF” a new person gives off when the join the company. and kinda wonder if a company that prioritized not getting this reaction from new hires might find it is the most impactful thing they can do in terms of culture.

Just to give a different, concrete, perspective (and push a hot button HN issue), I've spent a fair amount of time working on extremely large web applications, and by far the #1 "WTF WTF WTF" thing that new hires say is "what do you mean you aren't using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK??" Once you get away from "should we use version control" and into actually difficult software engineering questions, it's not clear how to…

> by far the #1 "WTF WTF WTF" thing that new hires say is "what do you mean you aren't using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK??"

To that speaks of the caliber of programmers hired. If all they have seen is $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK and wrote nothing but a web app using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK they might not grasp the fundamentals that would make then realize that frameworks are just abstractions (and not that different from one another).

I don't think any software engineer would even ask that question, since the answer will almost always be "$TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK didn't exist when the project started, and it's not worth a re-write to port it over".

Now, that brings out a second important truth: a company can't attract and retain a wide range of different caliber employees. For instance, if a place still questions the usefulness of source control (perhaps because they consider git to be too complicated) there's no way they'll attract and retain top performers. So the culture will select people that agree that source control is a waste of time.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#128

Post by KMag »

aj7 wrote: post #107

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser bea…

Interesting. I had an internship at a company that did inertial navigation, mostly for defence applications. I only knew of ring lasers for use in gyroscopes. (Send a laser around a loop wave guide/fiberoptic, and any translational acceleration cancels out going out and back, but any acceleration in rotational velocity in the plane of the ring/rotation vector perpendicular to the ring shows up as a Dopler shift. Tune the laser to have a standing wave, and rotational acceleration shifts the nodes of the standing wave around the ring.)

I had a colleague who got called up when a Trident missile MIRV bus fell off a forklift and he had to do simulations to tell the Navy if it was still good or needed to be brought back in for rework/recalibration. My understanding is that either the MRIV bus itself or its container has integral devices that record peak 3-axis acceleration for just such a scenario. I imagine they're as simple as a few precise weights on a few wires with precise failure strains, so you can bracket the peak acceleration by which wires broke and which survived.

On the one hand, it's great to have more accurate nukes, which allow lower yields, smaller stockpiles, and presumably smaller craters if everything goes sideways. On the other hand, "surgical" nukes result in it more likely that one side will use them and gamble that the other side won't massively retaliate.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#129

Post by Ensorceled »

PaulHoule wrote: post #122
Ensorceled wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They only way is to take down the old culture bearers. ... To change the culture, these people have to go. I was briefly head of engineering at a company that had several "old culture bearers" that made change impossible. I was something like the 3rd or 4th engineering leader over the space of a year. Apparently the person after me was actually allowed to fire a few of these people and was able to turn things aroun…

More than once I had to leave in order for an employer to take action against a problem employee, including my boss once. In these cases the employer suddenly realized that it made no sense to attempt to replace me without removing the reason that drove me out.

That is, unfortunately, very common. Though sometimes the toxic people drive the company into the ground first.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#130

Post by geenew »

aj7 wrote: post #107

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser bea…

I once encountered a situation with a very expensive field laser. At one point, measurements started showing an increasing amount of offset.

Over a period of days, the error became increasingly, comically bad, until finally the system refused to boot.

A technician was called, and after hearing about the behaviour, the first request was that a photo of the laser light exit port be taken.

It was obvious why it wouldn’t boot: a mirror in the light path had fallen off.

The worst part was, the mirror had been held on by glue, and had been slowly slipping out of place. The hot climate was probably a factor.

They really should have had someone to say ‘you can’t ship that’ when the topic of glue to hold mirrors came up.

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