[jurre]

You should have zero fear instilled when pressing any button. The system or process has failed if a single person pressing a button can bring something down unintended. Fix the system/process, don’t “instill fear” onto the person, it’s toxic, plus now you have to make sure any new person on boarded has “fear instilled”, and that’s just hugely unproductive

[qz2]

That’s precisely my point. A lot of people have no fear because they’re complacent or ignorant rather than the button is well engineered.

But to get there you need to fear the bad outcomes.

[ddelt]

I’m sorry, but this really hasn’t been my experience at all in web technology or managing on-prem systems either.

I used to be extremely fearful of making mistakes, and used to work in a zero-tolerance fear culture. My experience and the experience of my teammates on the DevOps team? We did everything manually and slowly because we couldn’t see past our own fear to think creatively on how to automate away errors. And yes, we still made errors doing everything carefully, with a second set of eyes, late night deployments, backups taken, etc.

Once our leadership at the time changed to espouse a culture of learning from a mistake and not being afraid to make one as long as you can recover and improve something, we reduced a lot of risk and actually automated away a lot of errors we typically made which were caused initially by fear culture.

Just my two cents.

[qz2]

I’m not talking about fear culture. It’s a more personal thing. Call it risk management culture if that helps which is the inverse.

Manual is wrong for a start. That would increase the probability of making a mistake and thus increase risk for example. The mitigations are automation, review and testing.

I agree with you. Perhaps fear was the wrong term. I treat it as my personal guide to how uneasy i feel about something on the quality front.

[inglor_cz]

I recalled Akimov pressing the AZ-5 button in Chernobyl...