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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

#161

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

latexr wrote: post #73
bheadmaster wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Singling out the engineer isn't blameless. Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do. > Sure it's a learning opportunity but it's a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn't be able to take the site down. The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerb…

> Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do. What you’re describing isn’t blamlessness, it’s forgiveness. It’s still putting the blame on someone but not punishing them for it (except making them feel worse by pointing it out). Blamelessness would be not singling them out in any way, treating the e…

> But we don’t assign blame during these sorts of events, so let’s just consider it an expensive learning opportunity to redesign the system so it can’t happen again.

It's the latter half of the sentence that makes it blameless. Zuckerberg is very clearly saying the problem is that it was allowed at all.

sometimes the root cause is someone fucking up, if you're not willing to attribute the root cause to someone making a mistake then being blameless is far less useful.

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

#162

Post by DiggyJohnson »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
bheadmaster wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Singling out the engineer isn't blameless. Considering that everyone already knew who was responsible, I think saying "you won't be held accountable for this mistake" is the most blameless thing you can do. > Sure it's a learning opportunity but it's a learning opportunity for everyone involved. One person shouldn't be able to take the site down. The way I read the comment, it sounds to me exactly like what Zuckerb…

Not really. If you single someone out as CEO that's a punishment. Even if your words are superficially nice what he really did was blame the engineer and told him not to do it again. He should have left it with the engineer's line manager to make that comment, if at all because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already. You did something well, but we made mistakes.

> because essentially he's telling the employee nothing that he didn't know already.

The employee did not know that the CEO would be so forgiving. And it helps set that culture as other's here about the incidence and response.

Also, why is this so important? If your punishment for bringing down Facebook is your boss' boss telling you "Hey even if this is a serious mistake, I don't want you to worry that you're going to be out of a job. Consider this a learning opportunity," than that seems more than fair to me.

Why worry about being so sensitive?

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

#164

Post by trey-jones »

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.

I think you can prevent a lot of revolt by just finding a way of putting this other than "software engineer output" should be held to standards. The whole point of this article is that the individual is not the problem. Rather, the system should prevent the individual from being the problem.

Nobody wants software quality to be regulated by people who don't know anything about software. So, probably we should be regulating ourselves. It's not an easy problem though. Can you really state a minimum safety standard for software that is quantifiable?

- All tests passing? Not good enough

- 100% test coverage? Not good enough

- AI approved code? ha

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

#165

Post by dr_orpheus »

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…

Near misses are absolutely like gifts from the heavens. I was part of a post-investigation for a near miss that would've looked like this if things had gone a bit differently:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19#Damage_during_manufact...

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

#166

Post by gadders »

I think it's a fairly safe assumption that if you are alive to read the article, you are unlikely to have been in a plane crash (yes, I agree some plane crashes are survivable).

Next article: Why you've never been struck by lightning.

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

#167

Post by alkonaut »

sgjohnson wrote: post #88
phkahler wrote: post #74

Boeing management should read this so they can maybe understand the nature of their quality problems is systemic and not the result of a few little oopses.

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…

There should definitely be some introspection around what constitutes an aircraft type and what doesn't. Perhaps it would be better if manufacturers could have more leeway in terms of redesigning newer models of aircraft without requiring retraining. Say e.g. if Boeing would make a completely different undercarriage to a new 737 so it was as tall on its legs as a 320.

That would have meant the MAX engines could have sat more like on the legacy 737. Which perhaps would have been a lesser change to the system overall than the changes made on the MAX? (larger engines, different engine placement, systems to counter the behavior coming from the new engine placement and so on and so forth). I'm not sure what the solution would be here, but it seems like any time a set of regulations is rigid-yet-full-of-holes it's almost better if it isn't so rigid.

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

#168

Post by charles_f »

gadders wrote: post #166

I think it's a fairly safe assumption that if you are alive to read the article, you are unlikely to have been in a plane crash (yes, I agree some plane crashes are survivable). Next article: Why you've never been struck by lightning.

It sounds like you didn't read the post. It's not an assumption, it's the explanation of why.

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

#169

Post by samtho »

awb wrote: post #156
roenxi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Instead of a blameless culture, more desirable is a shared responsibility culture. There are always things the engineer all the way up to the CEO could have done prior and could do after to move the company in a positive direction.

I don’t think “blameless” and “shared responsibility” are mutually exclusive, in fact, they are two halves to this same coin. The dictionary definition of “blameless” does not encompass the practical application of a “blameless” culture, which can be confusing.

The “blameless” part here means the individual who directly triggered the event is not culpable as long as they acted reasonably and per procedure. The “shared responsibility” part is how the organization views the problem and thus how they approach mitigating for the future.

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

#170

Post by karmakaze »

isolli wrote: post #7

"Cutting straight to the case, Wascher was not punished in any way." Have to appreciate a writer who doesn't force you to read until the very end of their piece in order to get the ending of the story.

This is where I stopped reading the story. I couldn't tell that we were getting to the point of answering the titled question. I'm guessing it's the blameless culture/process that keeps information flowing and improvements made.

'Blameless' doesn't work for corporations though.

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