Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#2> "The class itself is very well structured. I've heard about STPA in past years, but this was the first time I saw it explained with concrete examples. The Google example at the end was also really helpful."
But the article itself contains no concrete examples.
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#3This would have been a lot more compelling had they provided a single real-world example of STPA actually solving a reliability issue at Google.
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#4... So where's the training or examples of application?
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#5This is peak corporate drivel—bloated storytelling, buzzwords everywhere, and a desperate attempt to make an old idea sound revolutionary.
The article spends paragraphs on some childhood radio repair story before awkwardly linking it to STPA, a safety analysis method that’s been around for decades. Google didn’t invent it, but they act like adapting it for software is a major breakthrough.
Most of the piece is just filler about feedback loops and control structures—basic engineering concepts—framed as deep insights. The actual message? "We made an internal training program because existing STPA examples didn’t click with Googlers." That’s it. But instead of just saying that, they pad it out with corporate storytelling, self-congratulation, and hand-wringing over how hard it is to teach people things.
The ending is especially cringe: You can’t afford NOT to use this! Classic corporate play—take something mundane, slap on some urgency, and act like ignoring it is a reckless gamble.
TL;DR: Google is training engineers in STPA. That’s the whole story.
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#6... So where's the training or examples of application?
I do see one example at the bottom of https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/evolution-sr.... But I'm not sure it's particularly compelling?
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#7I don't understand and I really really want to.
This seems so cool at a scale that I can't fathom. Tell me specifically how it's done at google with regards to a specific service, at least enough information to understand what's going on. Make it concrete. Like "B lacks feedback from C", why is this bad?
You've told me absolutely nothing and it makes me angry.
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#8This is peak corporate drivel—bloated storytelling, buzzwords everywhere, and a desperate attempt to make an old idea sound revolutionary. The article spends paragraphs on some childhood radio repair story before awkwardly linking it to STPA, a safety analysis method that’s been around for decades. Google didn’t invent it, but they act like adapting it for software is a major breakthrough. Most of the piece is just f…
I'm not sure if things have changed over the past five years, but this is exactly the stuff you'd throw in a promotion packet or maybe in a performance (perf) review to hit that mythical "superb" rating.
The breaking point for me (and why I left after almost a decade) was when people started getting high ratings for fixing things they had an original hand in causing. Honestly, the comfiest job in the world if you're a professional bullshitter.
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#9> In one particular case at Google, a software controller–acting on bad feedback from another software system–determined that it should issue an unsafe control action. It scheduled this action to happen after 30 days. Even though there were indicators that this unsafe action was going to occur, no software engineers–humans–were actually monitoring the indicators. So, after 30 days, the unsafe control action occurred, resulting in an outage.
Isn't this the time they accidentally deleted governmental databases? I love the attempt at blameless generalization, but wow.
Re: Teaching a new way to prevent outages at Google
#10I don't understand and I really really want to. This seems so cool at a scale that I can't fathom. Tell me specifically how it's done at google with regards to a specific service, at least enough information to understand what's going on. Make it concrete. Like "B lacks feedback from C", why is this bad? You've told me absolutely nothing and it makes me angry.
[deleted]