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I think that's an acceptable takeaway in the context of the train company. And I don't think it's a sentiment incompatible with optimism about technological pro

by arlort 2y ago

I think that's an acceptable takeaway in the context of the train company. And I don't think it's a sentiment incompatible with optimism about technological progress As far as I get from the article they didn't call for help for two days trying to free the train with other trains, and the train was stuck in there in the first place because the staff saw a wall of snow and tried to plough through. I don't know if those were or are standard practice but it sounds like guests got somewhat close to suffering pretty serious consequences for it. Avoiding cannibalism is nice but also a pretty low bar to clear

tialaramex 2y ago
Commonly management tasked with say, rescuing a disabled train have a plan A and they get focused on trying to make plan A work even if plan A has now introduced so many further obstacles that a complete re-evaluation is appropriate. Yesterday was the first day of in person exams at my employer (a large University) and we got reports that a key system wasn't working, the students were not able to take one of the exams on offer that morning as instead a "User friendly" something-went-wrong-tell-a-grown-up message appeared. We didn't know, but in fact this bug could have been fixed by (temporarily) removing a single line of code from some server software, maybe 5-10 minutes to implement, test and ship to production under emergency conditions, then an afternoon of paperwork. However our early attempts to diagnose tickled a different bug making it seem hopeless, and so effort focused on manually tweaking the configuration of every single exam computer across the entire physical estate, which took maybe half an hour or more. The bug could also have been worked around, with insight, by a single SQL query, taking maybe 10 seconds to write and execute. The software would still be broken, but those students could have taken their exam which is what mattered. But we soldiered on with plan A. And that worked, it was just much slower. If it had taken a whole day I'd like to hope we'd have re-evaluated instead.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean, if this was to happen today, I think it's fairly unthinkable that the same thing (the company tries to solve it themselves for two days before involving authorities) would happen. If nothing else, they'd be sued, and rightly so. There's a difference between people not being able to take exams, and people potentially freezing to death.
- arlort 2y ago
  Different plans have different stakes. An exam being postponed is pretty drastically different as a worst case scenario than hundreds of people ending up frostbitten or worse
- deleted 2y ago
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by arlort 2y ago

tialaramex 2y ago

Commonly management tasked with say, rescuing a disabled train have a plan A and they get focused on trying to make plan A work even if plan A has now introduced so many further obstacles that a complete re-evaluation is appropriate. Yesterday was the first day of in person exams at my employer (a large University) and we got reports that a key system wasn't working, the students were not able to take one of the exams on offer that morning as instead a "User friendly" something-went-wrong-tell-a-grown-up message appeared. We didn't know, but in fact this bug could have been fixed by (temporarily) removing a single line of code from some server software, maybe 5-10 minutes to implement, test and ship to production under emergency conditions, then an afternoon of paperwork. However our early attempts to diagnose tickled a different bug making it seem hopeless, and so effort focused on manually tweaking the configuration of every single exam computer across the entire physical estate, which took maybe half an hour or more. The bug could also have been worked around, with insight, by a single SQL query, taking maybe 10 seconds to write and execute. The software would still be broken, but those students could have taken their exam which is what mattered. But we soldiered on with plan A. And that worked, it was just much slower. If it had taken a whole day I'd like to hope we'd have re-evaluated instead.

rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, if this was to happen today, I think it's fairly unthinkable that the same thing (the company tries to solve it themselves for two days before involving authorities) would happen. If nothing else, they'd be sued, and rightly so. There's a difference between people not being able to take exams, and people potentially freezing to death.
arlort 2y ago
Different plans have different stakes. An exam being postponed is pretty drastically different as a worst case scenario than hundreds of people ending up frostbitten or worse
deleted 2y ago
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