ptcrash

> Does doing more than "the common layman" make the conclusions reliable?

Yeah, by definition. Someone who has more knowledge in a subject is more reliable than someone who doesn't.

The author did more research than the common layman. From my perspective, the author fully assessed the situation. Do you have reason to believe the author hasn't done enough research?

I wholeheartedly agree with you. Our lawmakers and politicians should be held accountable for spreading lies. That being said, I still believe that this is an engineering problem first and not a problem with the Texas regulations or the politics behind why Texas has its own grid.

Having read the article, I didn't see any suggestions towards a solution... just clarifying which regulations would have helped/stratified the problem.

Why do you have an issue with a non-expert clarifying that he's not an expert? I prefer people call out their own ignorance as apposed to implying expertise they don't have.

The East, West, or Texas grids didn't implement it, you're right. My point is that Texas' grid is getting called out when that report was ignored by everyone. It's a national issue, not a Texas issue.

Which standards should they meet? NERC'S? That wouldn't have helped.

Exactly; I'm tired of this being conflated into a ~political issue.~

Edit: Sorry, let me specify. I'm tired of this being a Texas-only political issue. I agree that politics are at play but this isn't localized specifically to Texas' grid.

As in, Texas has a fair blend of both parties but get perceived as being "red". With the current political atmosphere, people tend to want to make issues political. What this article is trying to point out is that this was an engineering problem, not a policy problem.

If you read the article, you would see that there's a strong chance they still wouldn't have power. Texas' grid currently exceeds the requirements set out by NERC for winterization.

Yeah, that's a good distillation of what's going on. I think people have severely looked over just how significant this weather was and why it was really reasonable for engineers to not anticipate this situation.

What we really need to be reminded of is that this was caused by global warming stifling the typical northern jetstream. As long as global warming stays a problem, we will need to anticipate these types of extremes across the entire US.

I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives.

Which really isn't fair since Texas has a massive number of democratic voters. We have multiple large metropolitan areas but we also have massive rural regions that tend to outweigh when it comes time to vote.

What this really helps point out is how frequently people voice their opinions on matters online without fully assessing the situation.

As a Texan, I agree that the situation is more nuanced than what's being presented on the news, social media, and on HN. It's important to look at the policies in place to fully understand what could have been done to prevent the current problems.

I'd like to just point out that I stated sexual orientation was not a protected class less than 24 hours before SCOTUS made their ruling. It's funny how suddenly things can change.

Yes, it is discriminatory. But discrimination isn't illegal; discrimination against protected classes is. Examples of things hiring personnel can discriminate based on include political views, your weight, your sexuality (at leas here Texas), credit history, any bankruptcies, and unemployment.

I wear both a DevSecOps and a System Architect hat at work so take my experience with a grain of salt.

I spend maybe half of my time working alongside developers to define security controls that need to be added, verifying they were implemented, and testing production. I do this because I realized when reading The Phoenix Project that the only way for security to be taken seriously by a company, I have to have an integral hand in the SDLC. Ironically enough, by defining the security controls that must be put into scope this early in the process, I also am able to make sure our software maintains compliance. This experience will be very different for a company that has more technical debt then we do, keep in mind.

I spend maybe 10% of my time on compliance. However, this is because we've already achieved our benchmarks; I only focus on determining violations, remediation, and making sure the company is ready for the next audit. Like I said, we have little technical debt and I work tirelessly to make sure security controls have been identified before the scrum starts. Back when I was working to get us to this point, I spent perhaps 90% of my time learning about the compliance benchmarks we needed to achieve and when needed to happen for us to get there.

Personally, I've worked for a few startups and each one seemed to have little to no formal process for every function. Being that they are startups, agility is obviously everything. However, I found that without formal processes (with flowcharts; the whole nine yards) the companies seemed to have a ton of chaos surrounding them. I found it somewhat ironic that managers would tout how impactful The Phoenix Project was but would actively fight any documenting processes because they feared it would make the company too much of an enterprise and not a startup. This is just my own anecdotal perception of the culture of a select number of startups... but it makes me wonder if there is a correlation between the success of a startup and how well they can define what each task is. To answer my own question:

1. About 10% of our processes were defined and documented

2. Most of the time however they were not enforces

3. I think, like most things in life, there is a healthy balance between the two extremes. I think major functions like deployments, SDLC, incident management, and project life-cycles, should be documented but the auxiliary things should have lots of freedom. I think that regardless of the amount of established processes, a startup should be able and willing to adjust them as soon as a better process is established.