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Count to ten when a plane goes down

johncbeck.tumblr.com

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Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#271

Post by woodchuck64 »

marbletiles wrote: post #256
woodchuck64 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're wrong to ignore the consequences of the actions as an input to the punishment. This equivocates on "consequences" of actions, though. It's obvious that the consequences of hitting F7 before the incident were understood by all responsible to be low enough that any intern could be expected to make the right decision. After the incident, the consequences of hitting F7 were sharply increased such that no…

No, the consequences were the same before and after the incident: a total system reboot. The varying factor here was temporal: it was usually a low-risk action when the office was empty, a high-risk one when the office was full. The negligence on the intern's part was to make decisions and act without regard for risk as if he was in the low-risk window despite the evidence he was actually in the high-risk one (all th…

> No, the consequences were the same before and after

I'm talking about the perceived consequences, not the actual consequences. The fallacy here is to perceive low consequences at one point in time, perceive high consequences at a later time and then try to change history such that low consequences were never really perceived.

> The negligence on the intern's part was to make decisions and act without regard for risk as if he was in the low-risk window despite the evidence he was actually in the high-risk one (all the already-active PCs).

He was in a perceived low-risk window. The perceived consequence of accidental reboot was already figured in and was already perceived to be low. Else why would the F7 key be next to F6? It is certainly unfair to expect someone to perceive high-risk when everyone else perceives low-risk.

> It makes perfect sense that the punishment should reflect inappropriate regard being given for known consequences. That's what negligence is.

The perceived consequences were low-risk, therefore the known consequences were low-risk.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#272

Post by nathanb »

apples2apples wrote: post #241
nathanb wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? How did Itoh demonstrate that the company would be better without him than with him?

He was the one who was more responsible for the incident than the intern.

OK, probably I'm just dumb and have poor reading comprehension (and will get downvoted again for asking a simple question), but can you explain why Itoh was responsible?

It seems that the translators could have saved their work more regularly -- perhaps they hold some of the blame. Obviously the poster could have thought a bit before hitting the button -- he holds all the blame for the resetting of all the terminals. How is Itoh "more responsible"?

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#273

Post by nathanb »

samspot wrote: post #261
nathanb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're wrong to ignore the consequences of the actions as an input to the punishment. A small amount of unintentional carelessness that causes huge damage could still be punished. One could argue that a certain degree of mindfulness in critical situations is a job requirement, and casually making a careless -- though unintended -- mistake demonstrates a lack of mindfulness indicating that the person is not pr…

I got a strong impression from the article that he had no idea there were extra people there, or that there was even a critical situation. He wrote as though he was doing a mundane daily task, and said he was really surprised his boss was even there. Given those details, he had no reason to have a heightened sense of awareness. He also mentions that a reset of all workstations should have had no impact at the time. I…

Well, he mentioned that he noticed an exceptional circumstance right when he arrived -- notably, that computers which were usually his responsibility to turn on were already on. You could argue that a less negligent (and more aware) individual would have extrapolated that into a heightened sense of awareness.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#274

Post by marbletiles »

woodchuck64 wrote: post #271
marbletiles wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the consequences were the same before and after the incident: a total system reboot. The varying factor here was temporal: it was usually a low-risk action when the office was empty, a high-risk one when the office was full. The negligence on the intern's part was to make decisions and act without regard for risk as if he was in the low-risk window despite the evidence he was actually in the high-risk one (all th…

> No, the consequences were the same before and after I'm talking about the perceived consequences, not the actual consequences. The fallacy here is to perceive low consequences at one point in time, perceive high consequences at a later time and then try to change history such that low consequences were never really perceived. > The negligence on the intern's part was to make decisions and act without regard for ris…

> He was in a perceived low-risk window.

... because he was negligent. "Oh, all the computers are already on? That only happens when Washington's waiting on something. Oh well, I'll carry on like this was any other low-risk morning"

> Else why would the F7 key be next to F6?

Same reason why "rm -rf " is the one keystroke away from disaster. Perceived risk has nothing to do with it.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#275

Post by emn13 »

billmalarky wrote: post #231
emn13 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect the HR management back then was more enlightened than it is now - the quick-to-pounce media and politically instigated witch hunts (terrorism, save-the-kids, etc.) have ensured that cover-your-ass is more and more a necessity.

That sounds like rose colored glasses. The cold war had its fair share of witch hunts. Granted this was the 80's not the 50's but lets not forget McCarthyism was based around democracy vs communism. "That Korean announcement and the slow response by the US President—both caused by delayed real information—caused decades of conspiracy theories."

Oh, I don't think people are any worse - I just think there's more adherence to the letter of whatever regulations there are now. The principles of zero-tolerance (three strikes...) have been widely applied, regardless of the nuance of some situation.

Note also that it turns out the OP was "fired" but immediately rehired too...

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#276

Post by pooper »

djur wrote: post #119
pooper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ctrl + q very appropriately quits the application. If this came as a ticket to me, I'd close it as working as expected.

Traditionally applications have asked the user if they're sure they want to quit. That's a no-no these days, but it's still a reasonable choice in situations where the cost of quitting might be high (there's unsaved content, or the app takes a long time to start, or it's impossible to persist the current state of the application). For some time, the Chrome team refused to implement a 'Sure you want to quit?' popup du…

Mozilla Firefox used to have a setting under options/preferences to disable loading images and loading javascript. People complained and said this should be removed as not enough people use it and that people who use it can create/use an add-on to do the same.

It is not easy to find a right balance between providing adequate functionality while avoiding information overload. The web is still evolving. We are learning and we will do better (overall) as time goes by. :)

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#277

Post by woodchuck64 »

marbletiles wrote: post #274
woodchuck64 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the consequences were the same before and after I'm talking about the perceived consequences, not the actual consequences. The fallacy here is to perceive low consequences at one point in time, perceive high consequences at a later time and then try to change history such that low consequences were never really perceived. > The negligence on the intern's part was to make decisions and act without regard for ris…

> He was in a perceived low-risk window. ... because he was negligent. "Oh, all the computers are already on? That only happens when Washington's waiting on something. Oh well, I'll carry on like this was any other low-risk morning" > Else why would the F7 key be next to F6? Same reason why "rm -rf " is the one keystroke away from disaster. Perceived risk has nothing to do with it.

> "Oh, all the computers are already on? That only happens when Washington's waiting on something. Oh well, I'll carry on like this was any other low-risk morning"

Because those situations were also low-risk mornings. He only saw that pattern when people left late. He had no reason to expect that people would be working early in the morning because that situation had never occurred. Further, a secretary playing a computer game in the morning suggests business as usual, no one working.

> He was in a perceived low-risk window. ... because he was negligent

No, someone else set up the computers and software with F6 and F7 command functions side by side and then evaluated the entire network as low-risk for interns under all situations. It is perfectly reasonable for an intern to take the same low-risk perspective as his superiors.

> Same reason why "rm -rf " is the one keystroke away from disaster. Perceived risk has nothing to do with it.

Perceived risk has everything to do with it. It is inconceivable today that an intern would have unrestricted access to a company's file system and be literally a few keystrokes from disaster. The key reason for that is because perceived risk now is much closer to actual risk. In 1983, no one had a clue about the kinds of things that could go wrong. Understanding real risk is a painstaking process requiring time, trial and error.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#278

Post by apples2apples »

nathanb wrote: post #272
apples2apples wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was the one who was more responsible for the incident than the intern.

OK, probably I'm just dumb and have poor reading comprehension (and will get downvoted again for asking a simple question), but can you explain why Itoh was responsible? It seems that the translators could have saved their work more regularly -- perhaps they hold some of the blame. Obviously the poster could have thought a bit before hitting the button -- he holds all the blame for the resetting of all the terminals.…

My reasoning is that Mr. Itoh put an intern in charge of a system that could cause major damage. It's like giving the intern keys to your AWS console and shitting your pants when he terminates all you EBS root disks that you didn't back up.

Mr. Beck wasn't culpable because he didn't understand the full effects of his actions or the tension of the current situation. Ioth should not have let Beck in the door that morning and he should not have given that much power to the intern.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#279

Post by nness »

maaku wrote: post #218
tobltobs wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are american. Would you be also so generous if the majority off killed people would be americans?

Wtf does being American have to do with anything? And no, it doesn't make a lick of difference. The given situation was a fighter pilot who shot down a commercial airliner under orders later at some point in his career being given a medal for some completely, 100% unrelated reason. Maybe he deserved to be tried for war crimes. Maybe he also deserved that medal. Can you see that this is not cognitive dissonance?

It wasn't actually. Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down via a SM-2MR surface-to-air missile. Its the first paragraph on the Wikipedia article.

This is an insanely important distinction, since a fighter pilot would have had the opportunity to visually inspect the craft beforehand. Where in this case, the accident was made due to incorrect system information which misidentified the aircraft as being anything other than a commercial airline.

Re: Count to ten when a plane goes down

#280

Post by pooper »

SilasX wrote: post #263
pooper wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ctrl + q very appropriately quits the application. If this came as a ticket to me, I'd close it as working as expected.

... and then you'd spin it off as a feature (or design review) request for better handling of accidental quit actions, right?

I like this idea. I will try to remember this because it is the perfect answer in situations like these...
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