3 ms·

Folks let's be real. While the tech industry borrows terms and procedures from mature and inherently riskier industries like Aviation, 99% of the tech companies

by m1keil 2y ago

Folks let's be real. While the tech industry borrows terms and procedures from mature and inherently riskier industries like Aviation, 99% of the tech companies don't share the same risk profile. This means that in most cases, these RCAs are the output of a long and over engineered incident review process that was designed to impress the higher echelon. The problem is, that in a decently sized corporation, you have tens to hundreds of daily fuck ups (also known as "incidents") that completely suck out the free time out of engineers that have to navigate the long game of post incident management process. The utilisation of LLMs on these cases are just engineered solution to the problem of organisational bureaucracy.

aragilar 2y ago
Is not aviation, space-flight, etc. part of "tech"? While you can always over-do processes, you can also under-do them as well (I don't think I need to list examples here, just look at the news...). Having the processes also be able to adapt to different needs and requirements is part of having good processes.
- m1keil 2y ago
  I don't think symantics really matter here. I largely think of "tech" as companies that produce mainly virtual goods in the form of software. Most of these software is largely skins over databases. In most cases, nobody will get hurt if their product will malfunction. This is the vast majority of tech companies today. Exceptions exists. I would take under process any day of the week. From my experience, adding a process is far easier than removing it.
  - aragilar 2y ago
    If you do "tech" == "software" maybe I'd agree with you no one will get hurt (though the cynical part of me says "did you measure this, or do you want this to be true"), but S(cience)T(echnology)E(ngineering)M(athematics) is a thing, and it's definitely not just software.
droopyEyelids 2y ago
the trick is realizing that in a large company, the engineer time is already wasted on the goals of clueless leadership that will change before completion anyway, and then using the RCA to regain a bit of control over your roadmap (as a low level manager)
igornadj 2y ago
In my experience RCA is developer driven, pointing to structural issues in the org, which are then up to management to act on or not. For example, whistleblowers at Boeing are pointing out quality issues that are being ignored, not that there is too much paperwork like you are suggesting. Post-mortems are as short as possible because technical people usually write them and have better things to do. Getting an LLM to do them will only remove this feedback channel, as it is much easier to ignore a LLM suggesting more time or money is spent on quality than it is to ignore a human.

by m1keil 2y ago

aragilar 2y ago

Is not aviation, space-flight, etc. part of "tech"? While you can always over-do processes, you can also under-do them as well (I don't think I need to list examples here, just look at the news...). Having the processes also be able to adapt to different needs and requirements is part of having good processes.

m1keil 2y ago
I don't think symantics really matter here. I largely think of "tech" as companies that produce mainly virtual goods in the form of software. Most of these software is largely skins over databases. In most cases, nobody will get hurt if their product will malfunction. This is the vast majority of tech companies today. Exceptions exists. I would take under process any day of the week. From my experience, adding a process is far easier than removing it.
- aragilar 2y ago
  If you do "tech" == "software" maybe I'd agree with you no one will get hurt (though the cynical part of me says "did you measure this, or do you want this to be true"), but S(cience)T(echnology)E(ngineering)M(athematics) is a thing, and it's definitely not just software.

droopyEyelids 2y ago

the trick is realizing that in a large company, the engineer time is already wasted on the goals of clueless leadership that will change before completion anyway, and then using the RCA to regain a bit of control over your roadmap (as a low level manager)

igornadj 2y ago

In my experience RCA is developer driven, pointing to structural issues in the org, which are then up to management to act on or not. For example, whistleblowers at Boeing are pointing out quality issues that are being ignored, not that there is too much paperwork like you are suggesting. Post-mortems are as short as possible because technical people usually write them and have better things to do. Getting an LLM to do them will only remove this feedback channel, as it is much easier to ignore a LLM suggesting more time or money is spent on quality than it is to ignore a human.