Learning to understand the technobabble is hard even for engineers who aren't familiar with a system. If you're not an engineer the best you can do is hope to u

Learning to understand the technobabble is hard even for engineers who aren't familiar with a system. If you're not an engineer the best you can do is hope to understand the cliff notes. And understanding something about the software isn't going to help much anyway. In the examples of failures the author lists, the people who understood the system, the experts you'd turn to for understanding, probably didn't expect the failures that came about. So if you are learning to understand the system from them, how would you spot them? It seems like a bad argument from start to finish. Hire someone you can trust that is known to be competent, have them audit the software. Don't do it yourself.