5 ms·
Is it really fair to blame it on the technology? After a couple of oopsies it seems like it's more of a management issue than a technology issue. I imagine it'
by NegativeLatency 4y ago
Is it really fair to blame it on the technology? After a couple of oopsies it seems like it's more of a management issue than a technology issue.
I imagine it's a lot easier to deflect blame by blaming it on computers though.
- raverbashing 4y agoWell yeah, going down the '5-Whys' it ends up being management to blame
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThe flaw with 5 whys (not to say I don’t encourage it!) is they reflect the biases of the author while appearing unbiased and authoritative. So, it depends on who writes the post mortem who gets the blame.
- travisjungroth 4y agoYes, because there’s insufficient room for reality. Causality is this big DAG with tons of incoming edges, going back to the beginning of time. 5 Whys is creating a path 5 edges long. This is often useful, but it’s not “the truth”. If each node has 10 incoming edges, there are 100,000 paths you could take. At least it’s better than root cause analysis, which is walking back until you want to stop and declaring that the root. The real root is the creation of the universe. I mean that sincerely. When you follow definitions of causality, time and the universe, you end up with the Big Bang as the root of your graph. Everything is else is editorializing.
- bentcorner 4y ago"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
- darkerside 4y agoTo make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe, as they say
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoA real 5 whys analysis probably should give a tree. Why did X happen? Because A, B, and C. Why did A happen? Because A1 and A2. And so on.
- drivers99 4y agoFishbone diagram is one way to do that https://asq.org/quality-resources/fishbone https://asq.org/quality-resources/fishbone
- bluGill 4y agoYou don't need to do that because there will be more 5-whys. Just pick whichever of A1, A2 seems like a bigger deal and find a B that seems like the biggest contribution - until you get to some deep root cause you can solve and mitigate. Then you fix that one issue and move one. You WILL see more issues, if they are always in other places you must have got the right one, if not then you will see this again and this time you can go down A2. The important part of the above is by refusing create the whole tree you actually get something solved. Sometimes you will get the right one, sometimes you won't. You can spend a lot of time building a tree of problems, and find tens of thousands of things you can fix - and now you have a larger todo list than you have time to do and likely you don't get anything done. Or analysis paralysis in other words.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThis is specifically where bias comes in. People selectively prune the tree in ways that are either interesting (in a positive take) or deceptively based on their desire to avoid certain topics. Because the tree can be so large it isn’t always obvious even to the author whether they picked a branch because it was useful or because it served some other purpose - divert focus to a team they want to see behave differently, avoid taking blame for something, avoid being asked to fix something they don’t want to, etc. So, in this case the real question is “will they pick the branch that blames the people that pay and promote them, or take the branches that are of the least resistance.” Something this contentious would be vetted by committee in some way or another and at that point any upward finger pointing would be almost certainly curtailed in favor of a less contentious branch.
- Zigurd 4y agoManagement decision frameworks are often like that, but "5 Whys" is relatively innocuous - too simple to make tendentious. Mainly it is a reminder to dig until you hit bottom when doing root cause analysis.
- tialaramex 4y agoNot always. I read Accident Investigation reports for the transport industries in my countries. The vast majority of the time, management are a factor, for example the management of a bulk freighter haven't allowed enough crew for it to be operated safely, or the management of a airport haven't spent money on the improved hardware that would have prevented a dangerous incident. These reports inevitably have recommendations, many of which are directed to management. But once in a while it really isn't. My "favourite" was a fishing vessel which capsized killing everybody aboard. Why did it get into trouble? Because the entire crew were using heroin. That report has zero recommendations because there's nothing to recommend. It's already both illegal and obviously a bad idea to operate vessels at sea under the influence of drugs or alcohol, so there's nothing to recommend, those guys had only themselves to blame for their deaths.
- shuckles 4y agoYou could say it's management's fault they didn't know entire crews were on heroin. This is one of the challenges of being management: every failure is conceivably a management problem.
- tialaramex 4y agoWhat management? Small boat like that, everybody senior is likely a co-owner.
- nobody9999 4y ago>What management? Small boat like that, everybody senior is likely a co-owner. And probably on the boat when it capsized and high on heroin too.
- bertil 4y agoThe technology is not working because of a lack of investment, that much was obvious at Christmas. Factually describing the outage doesn’t remove responsibility; whoever didn’t take the first crisis seriously enough will face it soon enough. Right now, they need engineers, the FAA, flight controllers, etc. to unstuck them. Then there will be a blameless diagnostic. Then heads will roll and I’d be surprised if the most demotion won’t be a general manager.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoA few weeks after the first big incident, I applied for a couple of open IT roles at Southwest. Though I was well qualified for all of them, I never heard back from SWA, not even a "Thank you for applying" type of email. Makes me wonder if they thought the first incident was a fluke and they could go about business as normal. Also makes me wonder if they put out a bunch of ghost jobs to appear like they were staffing up. Most companies will at least acknowledge receipt of job applications no matter how unqualified the applicant and Southwest didn't even do that much.
- bluGill 4y agoI would be surprised if they can solve all their issues in 5 months no matter now much focus is put into it.
- dopylitty 4y agoIt really does come down to management. There are ways to make computer systems reliable but private companies seldom have the budget, will, organization, or patience to develop their systems to those specs. In lieu of that management should require business resiliency processes allowing the business to continue manually when the computer systems inevitably fail.
- dragonwriter 4y agoI can’t find the exact quote or its source, but one thing I’ve heard that has stuck with me is (probably unintentionally paraphrased): “Every problem blamed on ‘computer error’ involves at least two human errors, one of which is blaming the computer.”
- xd1936 4y ago"At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer." — Tom Glib
- LambdaComplex 4y agoAnd Sidney Dekker will tell you that blaming things on "human error" won't actually help you find the root cause of the problem.
- _8j50 4y agoThere is human error which is an error of an employee and there is process flaw which is managent's problem and while they are humans the flaw is not an error it is incompetence, especially when it happens more than twice.
- givemeethekeys 4y agoApparently the last CEO cut a lot of costs in favor of profitability.
- pixl97 4y agoEverything is working, I don't think we need that IT team then....
- markus_zhang 4y agoThis always triggers me to think that it is really difficult to give a score of what a CEO does. Many times they pumped up stocks and quit before problems they created surfaced yet. They were hailed as heroes and the next guy ate shit.
- lancesells 4y agoI feel this is the same way with US Presidents, although it's not really their choice when it comes to leaving.
- bluGill 4y agoEvery country without regular turn over on top seems to devolve to an evil dictatorship over time. Sometimes kings can be forced to give up power, until they become non-evil just for lack of power, but this takes centuries.
- pjmorris 4y ago"A loss of X dollars is always the responsibility of an executive whose financial responsibility exceeds X dollars." - Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’ - 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg, Dorset House Publishing, 1993
- ren_engineer 4y agoit's basically inevitable with how Southwest operates, they trade resiliency for efficiency. Same reason modern supply chains are so fragile, minimal redundancy anywhere. Tech seems to be one of the last places where people understand the value of resiliency, the way these companies run would be like not keeping database backups to save on storage costs. Or not having any excess capacity provisioned to handle traffic surges or hardware failures
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago>How many software engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? That's a hardware problem. >How many software engineers does it take to fix broken flight software? That's a management problem. >How do you fix this software problem? This question has been closed for being off-topic.
- adrr 4y agoIt's almost never a technology issue. It's an investment and prioritization issue.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]