5 ms·

Yeah indeed. You know who the one person at Amazon is that I'd expect to never fat finger a sensitive command ever ever again? The guy who managed to fat finger

by awj 10y ago

Yeah indeed. You know who the one person at Amazon is that I'd expect to never fat finger a sensitive command ever ever again? The guy who managed to fat finger S3 on Tuesday. Firing him over this mistake is worse than pointless, it offers absolution to every other developer and system that helped cause this event.

bbcbasic 10y ago
That old chestnut. Is it true?
- ellyagg 10y ago
  Is it not true for you? I know that I'm personally good at avoiding the same mistake. I'm also extraordinarily good at avoiding repeating catastrophic mistakes. I generally change my processes in the same way that Amazon is changing their processes to avoid this mistake.
  - bbcbasic 10y ago
    I am not talking about what Amazon are doing, but the concept that the individual wont make the same mistake again, which is what the grandparent is getting that. He won't make the same mistake because no one makes the same big mistake twice? I wouldn't bank on that alone.
ghurtado 10y ago
I'm guessing your comment was inspired by this: http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/01/criticism/ http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/01/criticism/
- awj 10y ago
  Not directly, but maybe that was running around in the back of my mind while I responded to it.
mulmen 10y ago
I think the value of making these mistakes is in learning from them and then making sure they can't happen again. Leaving this process in place and just making this guy run the command forever because he screwed it up once would be a much less effective solution than fixing the tooling so it's impossible to do this in the first place. Saying "this guy don't do it again" also offers absolution to everyone else on the team. In a healthy culture only we can fail.
vitalus 10y ago
I wouldn't merely call this a fat finger or typo - it's quite possible that the usage of the tool itself was so nefarious that mistakes would be impossible to avoid, given the complexity of its inputs. Based on Amazon's decision to improve the tooling such that this category of error would be (hopefully) impossible to reproduce, I would lean more towards that being the case.

by awj 10y ago

bbcbasic 10y ago

That old chestnut. Is it true?

ellyagg 10y ago
Is it not true for you? I know that I'm personally good at avoiding the same mistake. I'm also extraordinarily good at avoiding repeating catastrophic mistakes. I generally change my processes in the same way that Amazon is changing their processes to avoid this mistake.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  I am not talking about what Amazon are doing, but the concept that the individual wont make the same mistake again, which is what the grandparent is getting that. He won't make the same mistake because no one makes the same big mistake twice? I wouldn't bank on that alone.

ghurtado 10y ago

I'm guessing your comment was inspired by this: http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/01/criticism/ http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/01/criticism/

awj 10y ago
Not directly, but maybe that was running around in the back of my mind while I responded to it.

mulmen 10y ago

I think the value of making these mistakes is in learning from them and then making sure they can't happen again. Leaving this process in place and just making this guy run the command forever because he screwed it up once would be a much less effective solution than fixing the tooling so it's impossible to do this in the first place. Saying "this guy don't do it again" also offers absolution to everyone else on the team. In a healthy culture only we can fail.

vitalus 10y ago

I wouldn't merely call this a fat finger or typo - it's quite possible that the usage of the tool itself was so nefarious that mistakes would be impossible to avoid, given the complexity of its inputs. Based on Amazon's decision to improve the tooling such that this category of error would be (hopefully) impossible to reproduce, I would lean more towards that being the case.