2 ms·
I'm not reading it this way, illustrated by: > explaining to him why he shouldn't press the button won't prevent anyone else from making the same mistake. How
by charles_f 7y ago
I'm not reading it this way, illustrated by:
> explaining to him why he shouldn't press the button won't prevent anyone else from making the same mistake.
How I interpret the point is: don't fix people, fix tool.
You can't tell someone not to break the system, you need to make the system less easy to break, labels on buttons, confirmation dialogs, no double negatives, approvals if need be.
Reminds me of a deployment with a customer (some 15y ago), I wasn't allowed to "touch prod" myself so I was sitting next to a button pusher doing what I was telling him to do (irony...). At some point there was some trickery involved to reboot HA instances one at a time rather than simultaneously, and you had to press "No" when prompted if you wanted to reboot. Before the dialog showed up, I pre-conditioned the guy, telling him "it's going to ask if you want to reboot, say no. Whatever you do, do not click on yes". This wasn't the first time he deployed. He said "oh, ok" then sure enough clicked on yes, and the IT police was in our room 2 minutes later because of a prod outage we just caused.
I have thought many times of what could have prevented that - allowing me to deploy myself, doing more training to that guy, finding a competent replacement to him, more documentation. There is no process that would have worked better to fix the issue than finding a way to remove this dialog box - today that would be done through automation.