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Normalization of Deviance
- aelmeleegy 8y agoThis is a great piece! I started reading it and was 100% captured by how informed the arguments are. Thank you!
- killjoywashere 8y agoThis would be a good speech for everyone a few years after graduating college.
- KineticLensman 8y agoThe article draws on the definitive text in this area by Diane Vaughan[0]. Read her work on the Challenger Launch Decision - it goes into the details of why the deviance was normalised. Even down to the level of how important decision making conference calls marginalised technical inputs. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_and_the_normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...
- alexpetralia 8y agoOne of the best essays I've read in a while. A new mental model to keep in mind. Thanks for this.
- tonto 8y agoThe turn in the middle of the article about taking care of yourself is interesting. If you only skimmed the first part of the article you might miss that positive message
- Topolomancer 8y agoI was very surprised to discover this part. It also led me to discover a rabbit hole (spurred by the 'Spoon Theory' example) for which I did not have a name previously. It is always amazing how certain articles suddenly give a name to a phenomenon that I had to use so many words to describe. This kind of content is what I come to HN for!
- pjc50 8y agoGlad you've discovered "spoon theory" - it's become a common shorthand in some internet communities for all kinds of chronic illness / mental health impairments and the need to explain why a seemingly trivial thing seems overwhelming.
- AlexTWithBeard 8y agoI've just learned about this spoon analogy and absolutely loved it. What's better, it's not just about disabilities. You've got kids to take care of? Here goes one spoon. You are not a native speaker and a bit slow in getting what others say? Here goes another one. A sick spouse at home? The third and the last one is gone and that's when things become interesting!
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoI don't really know if I'm comfortable applying spoon theory to contexts outside of disabilities (and even outside of chronic illness). In the context of chronic illness going out of one's spoons has serious, long-term, immediate, and maybe debilitating repercussions for the person in the management of their condition. The original context was that someone has like 10 spoons that day, and showering is 2 spoons and clothing onessels is 2 more spoons unless a piece of clothing has buttons which makes it 3 spoons due to joint pain in the hands. This was in order to show how incredibly resource intensive chronic illness management is and how it limits a lifestyle. It is a much different thing than having to take care of a child, not being a native speaker, or having a sick spouse, which describe additional difficulties onto an otherwise functional human being. Spoon theory explicitly applies to the context in which fundamentally functional actions like self-care take significantly more resources than expected. I have some concern that this is actually a dilution of the original meaning such that it removes its original usefullness to the chronically ill community, which has to deal with the stigma of being potentially severely limited with an "invisible" illness, and the spoon theory was an attempt to describe the "invisible" illness's effect on a person's life (therefore aiding in destigmatization). By diluting the original meaning, we may be contributing to the continued stigmatizing of "invisible" illnesses, as now spoon theory is changed to mean something almost opposite of its original meaning.
- christophilus 8y agoHere is an excellent talk on this subject[0]. It's one of the few presentations I like to watch every once in a while. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
- jki275 8y agohttps://fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-i-almost-destroyed-a-50-million-war-plane-when-display-flying-goes-wrong-and-the-normalisation-of-deviance/ https://fastjetperformance.com/podcasts/how-i-almost-destroy...
- jonjonesjr 8y agoWorks with society as well as tech.
- masto 8y agoThere's a version of this in SRE where the performance your system delivers becomes the performance people expect. And then they build their systems to depend on that performance, regardless of what your actual SLA is. Paradoxically, delivering better than the performance you're actually capable of sustaining can set things up to break very badly when something fails "within SLA".
- NickNameNick 8y agoThere was a post here a little while ago about a google service (I think it was 'locky') that the SREs would deliberately disable if they had over-met their SLA. This forced the developers of dependent systems to handle outages correctly.
- nsm 8y agoIt’s Chubby, and it is a lock server :)
- thegeomaster 8y agoGreat, well written piece with an eloquently explained and useful, positive message. Awesome!
- gnuvince 8y agoDan Luu has an article titled exactly the same: https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/
- eadmund 8y ago> There's the company where I worked on a four person effort with a multi-hundred million dollar budget and a billion dollar a year impact, where requests for things that cost hundreds of dollars routinely took months or were denied. I’m so used to seeing this, but I still don’t get it. Seriously, we spend $X/week on some nice-but-unnecessary luxury, but won’t spend $X/16 once for some really useful thing. I suspect that it has to do with how corporate budgets are designed, but … maybe they could be designed better?
- pjc50 8y agoPower and control. It's rarely quite so concrete, but because money is so countable and is explicitly subject to control that it is seen most keenly. Most companies will have some sort of "financial controller" role, and it all flows downhill from there. It's where the false positive / false negative phenomenon comes in, too. The person doing the controlling has an incentive to reject as many requests as possible, because they get criticised for any retroactively identified as "waste" - but they don't get to see, and can't count, all the time wasted dealing with the process and opportunities lost as a result. I once worked for a small company that would let you buy anything under £100 on the company card so long as you sent in an explanation by the end of the month, preferably identifying a client it could be billed to. This worked very well because when you put "£100k engineer time, £10k custom electronics, £10 misc stationary" on the same invoice no sane person is going to question the stationary.
- cwmma 8y agoHow speed limits are enforced in America always bothers me, because there is this great disconnect between planners and everybody else. Planners think of speeds of roads being intrinsic to the design of the road thus if a people are going to fast on a road, you need to change it by narrowing it or putting in bumps or something. The other side of this is to think of speeds of a road as based on whats around it, so if there are a lot of houses on a road, people should go slower so you don't hit people so you put in speed limits. But the problem with limits is that since the road feels faster then the the speed limit, people just go faster then the limit, but since changing the road is a lot more expensive then just putting up speed limits that tool is used a lot less frequently.
- jnty 8y agoIt is bizarre that we are discussing making cars entirely autonomous as a way of improving safety, but refuse to consider the much more feasible option of technologically restricting speed on public roads.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoIt might be technically feasible, but not politically feasible. While it is a no brainer to say every vehicle should be traveling sufficiently far behind another such that they have enough time to stop before they hit the one in front, this spacing out of vehicles will result in longer travel times as you are effectively reducing road capacity by having each vehicle take up more space on the road. Instead, it's (politically) easier to have each person take individual risks of getting into a collision. However, with autonomous vehicles, it should be politically easier to force this constraint because the liability will be shifted from individuals to presumably the manufacturer so the manufacturer isn't going to stick their neck out so the individuals can save time on their commute.
- andyjpb 8y agoSlowing down traffic can, in fact, increase the throughput of the road, especially when it is busy. This is for two reasons: 1) slower traffic requires a smaller safety gap between each vehicle. 2) the dominating factor in traffic jams is often people responding to the brake-lights of the people in front of them. People over compensate and therefore a "braking bubble" (Soltion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton ) forms in the traffic which causes it to get even more spaced out. Keeping traffic flowing is more important to throughput than keeping it flowing it fast. Constant braking and speeding up on a busy road means that the flow rate is constantly disrupted and this causes the traffic to tend towards clumping and congestion. You're not "in traffic"; you "are traffic".
- aasasd 8y ago> We had built a system that generated thousands of lines of logs for every test, with lots of “failures” recorded in them. Things like “tried to initialize FOOBAR_CONTROLLER: FAILED!!!,” but we just ran that code on all machines, even ones without the FOOBAR_CONTROLLER hardware. So no one noticed when another 5 lines of errors popped up in a 2000-line log file. This right there is a big red flag. The whole bendy business is bad enough, but here you're actively training people to ignore the wolf cries. Don't allow false failures in tests. The entire test suite needs to be binary: either everything works, or it fails.
- taneq 8y agoLikewise, this is why it's important not to let compiler warnings slide. If your build process spews out a bazillion lines of cruft then that one new warning which indicates a serious error will get lost in the noise. I don't go so far as to enable warnings-as-errors or anything but I do build with -Wall and generally won't check in code which builds with warnings.
- munk-a 8y agoAs a company you can decide where to fall on this scale, I applaud you for -Wall'ing but for most it's too much, the important thing is to make sure that everyone has agreed which warnings are acceptable and you refuse code that violates that. We're using PHP (so runtime warnings, instead of compiler issues) but we have a zero-error policy, if anything raises a warning or error we refuse to merge (or ticketize fixing since a bunch of stuff is legacy and we're still paying it down).
- petermcneeley 8y agoThis unintelligible scree doesnt even get the challenger disaster correct. The challenger disaster has almost nothing to do with engineering but has everything to do with management and politics.
- pjc50 8y agoFor a project of more than one person size, such as a space programme, you cannot separate the management and politics of engineering from the engineering itself.
- petermcneeley 8y agoRight but the article describes the event as though the engineers in the ground were just normalizing deviance which is simply not the case.
- detaro 8y agoWhere does it say that about the specific engineers on the ground vs the entire org doing/causing it?
- petermcneeley 8y ago"But you’ve launched at 40F and it was fine, and then one day you had to launch at 35F and it was fine, and then on a particularly bad day you had to launch at 30F and you’re fine. So you normalize this deviance. You can launch down to 30F, if you really have to. But then one day you’ve missed a bunch of launch windows and it’s 28F and the overnight temperatures were 18F but you did a quick check of the designs and specs and you probably have enough safety margin to launch, so you say GO." Now contrast this with the wiki entry "NASA managers also disregarded warnings from engineers about the dangers of launching posed by the low temperatures of that morning, and failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their superiors."
- 8y ago
- jancsika 8y ago> They put their passwords in their wallet and in their phone. The author is underplaying the problem here. There were tests that showed burns through the o-rings and the reports rationalized the danger-- not by normalization of deviance but through deceptive language. It's a lot more like having an audit that shows that no users were observed writing a password on a sheet and putting it in their wallet. And since extant passwords sheets stored in wallets don't match an idiosyncratic definition of "written down" they pass the audit. That's not to say that normalization of deviance didn't happen. Obviously both it and a more direct type of corruption happened. But I get the sense the author here is trying to cram everything into the former to make a tractable problem out of a messy political situation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gumby 8y agoBTW this is about deviation, not deviance.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago'''The crew probably survived in the reinforced cabin until it struck the ocean.''' I went cold reading that. I assumed the explosion took the whole shuttle out instantly.