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by asdfman123 2194 days ago
It's one of the largest industries in the world. They have offices, and use software too!
2 comments

IMO there are some really interesting CSB investigations into oil refinery/industrial accidents caused by bad software design (overwhelming operators with alarms is a big one.) Lots of people on here could gain by watching them. I used to put them on to fall asleep at night.
Oil is so much bigger than just refineries and oil wells. There's the upstream industry, the downstream industry, services and exploration, research, financial sectors, etc. etc. etc. There's a whole fleet of office workers to support them, and a lot of data to manage.
If we're thinking of the same YouTube channel, there are some excellent lessons to take away from those disaster investigations.

Now whenever I hear phrases like "we have to use the manual override most of the time" or "this alarm goes off all the time, it doesn't mean anything is broken", I am happy that the worst I can do is break a deployment, not explode an entire block.

Field workers do have an office and run software, it's just that it's a little box on the edge of the rig!