197 karma · joined January 29, 2020
It's very simple: the only way to 100% prevent an incident is the absence of production at all. If your incentive is to avoid incidents at all cost, you are incentivized to prevent production entirely.
Copying from one digital medium to another is a very easy operation (to the contrary of copying from paper to paper). At equal "care" I don't see why digital backups should be worse than paper ones.
Can you explain why that is an issue?
Any source on that? I agree with the assessment about engineers (althought it's a generalization), but I always thought it was because their "focused work" is what they actually like doing. In my experience work was most stressful when it strayed the most from focused work.
So the general principle should be clarified as: _concentrate on the high-order bits, *iff the low-order bits don't matter*_. This is arguably the case for the examples given by the blog post, as missing a flight isn't really the end of the world. Still, it's a huge waste of time _on a single trip_, so you benefit from not caring about it only if you travel often enough. This shows than even in case where low-order bits aren't dramatic, they still need to be taken into account into a cost-benefit analysis.
Looks like the crucial issue to me. The SPOF which enables something as absurd as "Firefox Outage".