[rockmeamedee]

It's a common thread in Incident Response & "Resilience Engineering" that preventative measures that reduce the blast of incidents are always blamed, especially if they work. Whatever ends up working to fix the incident, you should have done it sooner or it was too drastic a response. (No matter the fact that it _did_ fix the incident, outsiders will blame you that way).

One example is the Knight Capital trading disaster, where they eventually noticed (I don't remember the exact number) X minutes after the runway trading bot had been put into place, and shut it down, but got blamed for not shutting down the trading soon enough.

Can't find any links about this right now though :(

[hateful]

I see this in Programming/IT a lot. Also a very similar case whereby the person fixing the issue gets pressure to complete the fix and even blame after the fact.

It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.

[afiori]

> It would be like going to doctor and blaming the doctors for why I was sick.

To be fair, I am sure doctors experience that a lot.

[dr_zoidberg]

It depends. I blame the dentist that fixed my tooth in a substandard way and then I had to have it removed, because the bad fix had it broken a couple of years down the line.

I also blame him because, over the years, other patients of him had trouble for his sloppy work.

I absolutely praise the dentist I went after that one, who made his best to fix everything, explained me the pros and cons of every decision he made, and ultimately got me top notch (as best as could be done).

Sorry for he weird "counterpoint", but the example could be open to ambiguity. I still get the point: don't blame the guy fixing things when it's someone elses responsibility.

In my case: I'd be wrong to blame the 2nd dentist for the mistakes of the 1st.

[afiori]

Sure, I just wanted to say that the criticized behavior of blaming the problem on the person that is trying to solve it is something that also happen to doctor. Simply to say that it is not a prerogative of programming or safety.

[dr_zoidberg]

Sure, and in retrospective my answer was a bit more to gp than to you.

[magicalhippo]

I'm reminded of year 2000. Yes complete overreaction, but I'm also certain it would not have been such a non-event if it weren't for that extreme attention it got.

[bluGill]

Most of the bad things predicted by the media wouldn't have happened even if no effort was spent. However there would have been a lot of things not predicted by the media that would have been bad. The bad things the media predicted were easy to put into a sentence, while the bad things that would have happened would take books to explain. They would only really be bad because of the sum total happening all at once.

[asveikau]

This.

Everyday people in the leadup to y2k assumed it meant that every computer would somehow explode. Almost nobody stopped to actually reason through the real life consequence of a program getting the date and time wrong.

[dr_zoidberg]

You mean Y2K? Yeah I remember there was even a Simpson episode about it being absolute chaos (one of the Tree House Horror episodes). And then pretty much "nothing happened" (a few ATMs here and there spitting money randomly, a few funny incidents, but nothing of scale) and the world thought IT people had been paranoid over nothing.

Fast forward to 2020, we still have Feb 29 bugs around (I saw a few posted on twitter, none in person). The response back then was huge and adequate, but totally underappreciated as time went by.

[trakter]

One of the Feb 29 bugs I saw this year was that when I logged on to Skype for Business Monday March 2nd, everyone in my company that had logged off their computers on Friday Feb 28th, had a message about being offline for anywhere between 20-40 days. It just didn't know how to handle that day.

[whatshisface]

There is one thing that will help avoid some of this: across every county, state, and nation, there will be differing levels of response, and when it's all over it will be clear who got their medical systems overwhelmed as a result of denialism, and who wasted a bunch of money due to alarmism.

[DyslexicAtheist]

"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate" --M. Leavitt DHHS