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It's an understandable error only if residents and their safety isn't at the front of your mind. Perhaps if a resident had been closely involved they would have

It's an understandable error only if residents and their safety isn't at the front of your mind. Perhaps if a resident had been closely involved they would have been able to tell the developers that they don't have anything in the location field. It's not like Stanford didn't know a limited supply vaccine was coming several months ago, there was time to figure this stuff out. And it would have been, if it had been a high enough priority.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Not everything can be high priority. Stanford administrators several months ago would have been working on securing adequate supplies and staffing for the expected fall surge; that's a much more important problem, both to the system as a whole and to the residents, than who gets vaccinated today vs. next week.
- tannedNerd 6y ago
  The article says they realized the error Tuesday and did nothing about it till the residents staged a protest. It very much seems like they were hopping it would blow over.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I've got to be honest with you: this thing can totally be solved with a human pass. In fact, give me the list, your employment rolls, and I'll fix this for you for free in a couple of hours at max. Government workers are particularly vulnerable to this sort of failure mode: assuming everything is hard. This is not that hard. It's pretty easy. But big company workers are also usually susceptible to this. They don't get things done very fast so they're used to things taking a long time to do and assume that even trivialities must take a couple of days. But that's why companies like Tesla and SpaceX succeed to these peoples' surprise. They look at these companies and say "They can't do that. This is hard. It takes maybe a half century of engineering." Turns out lots of things, even if they're hard, can be done pretty fast. But not by those who've been damaged by their own slowness not being punished.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    If you gave Tesla or SpaceX the task of managing a vaccine rollout, they wouldn't see this as a problem to fix, because they wouldn't construct a public, detailed priority list cross-checked for equity across every subgroup. They'd just reach out to the N people that seem best at a quick glance, say "hey come get your vaccine", and repeat as new shipments come in until everyone's vaccinated. That bias towards doing things, rather than going to laborious efforts checking plans against everyone who might be affected, is exactly why they can do things so fast.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Not everything can be high priority. Stanford administrators several months ago would have been working on securing adequate supplies and staffing for the expected fall surge; that's a much more important problem, both to the system as a whole and to the residents, than who gets vaccinated today vs. next week.

tannedNerd 6y ago
The article says they realized the error Tuesday and did nothing about it till the residents staged a protest. It very much seems like they were hopping it would blow over.
renewiltord 6y ago
I've got to be honest with you: this thing can totally be solved with a human pass. In fact, give me the list, your employment rolls, and I'll fix this for you for free in a couple of hours at max. Government workers are particularly vulnerable to this sort of failure mode: assuming everything is hard. This is not that hard. It's pretty easy. But big company workers are also usually susceptible to this. They don't get things done very fast so they're used to things taking a long time to do and assume that even trivialities must take a couple of days. But that's why companies like Tesla and SpaceX succeed to these peoples' surprise. They look at these companies and say "They can't do that. This is hard. It takes maybe a half century of engineering." Turns out lots of things, even if they're hard, can be done pretty fast. But not by those who've been damaged by their own slowness not being punished.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  If you gave Tesla or SpaceX the task of managing a vaccine rollout, they wouldn't see this as a problem to fix, because they wouldn't construct a public, detailed priority list cross-checked for equity across every subgroup. They'd just reach out to the N people that seem best at a quick glance, say "hey come get your vaccine", and repeat as new shipments come in until everyone's vaccinated. That bias towards doing things, rather than going to laborious efforts checking plans against everyone who might be affected, is exactly why they can do things so fast.