5 ms·

Someday, perhaps computer programmers will start applying this principle.

Analemma_ 9y ago
They do, or at least the big-scale places who know what they’re doing do. When Gmail or aws-east-1 or something goes down for hours, nobody is fired: they figure out why it was allowed to happen and change procedures so it can’t happen again.
goblin89 9y ago
Perhaps not all tech companies care to push past human error in each postmortem (or even have a proper formal process at all), but some are known to do just that. Etsy and Google are among the well-documented cases. > This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories to help understand what went wrong. — Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ > Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. … Blameless culture originated in the healthcare and avionics industries where mistakes can be fatal. These industries nurture an environment where every "mistake" is seen as an opportunity to strengthen the system. When postmortems shift from allocating blame to investigating the systematic reasons why an individual or team had incomplete or incorrect information, effective prevention plans can be put in place. You can’t "fix" people, but you can fix systems and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems. — Site Reliability Engineering — Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-culture.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-cult...
- lttlrck 9y ago
  This was address very well by a video posted on the Piper Alpha story yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732404 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9h8MKG88_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9h8MKG88_U
- kevan 9y ago
  Amazon is pretty strong on this front too, the most recent public example is the S3 outage and postmortem[1]. >Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.... We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
athenot 9y ago
They do. That's what UX is all about. Not just UI, not just making thing possible or visual, but actually making the experience as smooth and frictionless as possible.
- Tloewald 9y ago
  UX is the bane of usability (at least as practiced). E.g. We've had professional "UX" designers seriously contend that "cancel" buttons should be made to not look like buttons. The joke at a certain large company was that if the UX designers had their way every default button would be big and green and every other button would be invisible. True usability is about helping people make the correct decision, not just being smooth and frictionless. (See Don Norman's classic example of fire escapes that send people into basements to be trapped.)
  - athenot 9y ago
    True. But as with any other discipline, it's about thinking about the intent and final goal, not just following a rule book containing arbitrary roles.
  - scrooched_moose 9y ago
    I'm a daily user of some of the most complicated engineering software on the market. Every single release promises "Easier to use!" but all they do is make the most basic beginner-level actions more prominent and hide all medium to advanced level important functionality behind 3 extra clicks. The end result is a beginner can do a tutorial exercise in 20 minutes instead of 30, while any true day to day work in the software takes 4 hours instead of 2.
    - mysterydip 9y ago
      From the company's perspective, getting more beginner users on the software (and converting them to regularly paying users) is probably the priority. That doesn't mean they couldn't put an "advanced mode" setting/option that makes the UI streamlined towards users like yourself, though.
dredmorbius 9y ago
While I agree generally with that sentiment, there's a key difference. Airplane pilots are licensed, certified, trained, and regulated. There's a clear floor to who is allowed in the cockpit (barring extreme emergencies, e.g., incapacitation of a pilot). By contrast, software is made available to pretty much the entire world. And it turns out that two thirds of all adults have "poor", "below poor", or no computer skills at all. Which is to say, the qualifications floor is nonexistent. If you're designing a one-size-fits-all system, you've got to design for this. The results, I'd argue, are ... not particularly satisfactory. I'm not saying "don't design for the user in mind", or "don't dismiss user error". But rather, than when your floor is zero, you're going to have a remarkably difficult challenge. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

They do, or at least the big-scale places who know what they’re doing do. When Gmail or aws-east-1 or something goes down for hours, nobody is fired: they figure out why it was allowed to happen and change procedures so it can’t happen again.

goblin89 9y ago

Perhaps not all tech companies care to push past human error in each postmortem (or even have a proper formal process at all), but some are known to do just that. Etsy and Google are among the well-documented cases. > This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories to help understand what went wrong. — Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture, https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/ > Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. … Blameless culture originated in the healthcare and avionics industries where mistakes can be fatal. These industries nurture an environment where every "mistake" is seen as an opportunity to strengthen the system. When postmortems shift from allocating blame to investigating the systematic reasons why an individual or team had incomplete or incorrect information, effective prevention plans can be put in place. You can’t "fix" people, but you can fix systems and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems. — Site Reliability Engineering — Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-culture.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-cult...

lttlrck 9y ago
This was address very well by a video posted on the Piper Alpha story yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14732404 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9h8MKG88_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9h8MKG88_U
kevan 9y ago
Amazon is pretty strong on this front too, the most recent public example is the S3 outage and postmortem[1]. >Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.... We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

athenot 9y ago

They do. That's what UX is all about. Not just UI, not just making thing possible or visual, but actually making the experience as smooth and frictionless as possible.

Tloewald 9y ago
UX is the bane of usability (at least as practiced). E.g. We've had professional "UX" designers seriously contend that "cancel" buttons should be made to not look like buttons. The joke at a certain large company was that if the UX designers had their way every default button would be big and green and every other button would be invisible. True usability is about helping people make the correct decision, not just being smooth and frictionless. (See Don Norman's classic example of fire escapes that send people into basements to be trapped.)
- athenot 9y ago
  True. But as with any other discipline, it's about thinking about the intent and final goal, not just following a rule book containing arbitrary roles.
- scrooched_moose 9y ago
  I'm a daily user of some of the most complicated engineering software on the market. Every single release promises "Easier to use!" but all they do is make the most basic beginner-level actions more prominent and hide all medium to advanced level important functionality behind 3 extra clicks. The end result is a beginner can do a tutorial exercise in 20 minutes instead of 30, while any true day to day work in the software takes 4 hours instead of 2.
  - mysterydip 9y ago
    From the company's perspective, getting more beginner users on the software (and converting them to regularly paying users) is probably the priority. That doesn't mean they couldn't put an "advanced mode" setting/option that makes the UI streamlined towards users like yourself, though.

dredmorbius 9y ago

While I agree generally with that sentiment, there's a key difference. Airplane pilots are licensed, certified, trained, and regulated. There's a clear floor to who is allowed in the cockpit (barring extreme emergencies, e.g., incapacitation of a pilot). By contrast, software is made available to pretty much the entire world. And it turns out that two thirds of all adults have "poor", "below poor", or no computer skills at all. Which is to say, the qualifications floor is nonexistent. If you're designing a one-size-fits-all system, you've got to design for this. The results, I'd argue, are ... not particularly satisfactory. I'm not saying "don't design for the user in mind", or "don't dismiss user error". But rather, than when your floor is zero, you're going to have a remarkably difficult challenge. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...