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Comment by cjonas | Hacker News Reader

(semi-related) High risk activities like backcountry skiing and climbing do "teach" skills that are very transferable to software PM and change governance. Risk tolerance is one of such skills.

Too much effort is often put into preventing low cost issues and scolding those who make them.

Beyond hurting morale, it reduces efficiency and innovation because everyone is afraid to make even a trivial mistake.

What I'm trying to say is...

"Move fast and break shit! ...But maybe not that shit over there because it's actually quite critical"

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I work in capital markets. I both design and build systems that automatically quote prices to the market and automatically make trading decisions. The financial consequences of getting either of these things wrong can be quite high, but many of my colleagues (i.e. traders) don't seem to understand the scope of things that could possibly go wrong when you're building software. I have noticed that experienced traders are usually very comfortable with taking some amount of risk (it's their job), but I have also noticed that with some people, that comfort with risk taking can spill over in to other areas where they simply don't have enough background or knowledge to properly assess the risks. So while I think comfort with risk taking is good, it's important to also question your own depth of understanding of the domain you're assessing risk in before dismissing other's concerns.

This is also analogous to backcountry skiing/climbing risk management. Many expert climbers have died because they became too comfortable with the risks and make a novice mistake.

And "considerable" Avalanche conditions result in far more deaths and "high" or "extreme", because they offer just enough stability to allow skiers to build a false sense of security.

My point is just that professionals of these activities have developed frameworks for evaluating risk and I think it's interesting how they might be applied to other disaplines.

Thinking about deepwater horizon, Teflon Tony and their safety culture?

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