| This in and of itself is the problem When every system is *critical system for somebody* and the downtime means loss of capacity, then people are actually hurt, and there are real problems when these things do go down. So you become numb, like a triage nurse, to real suffering because you’re in a system that doesn’t actually give people the resources to fix these things. Most of the harms in the world are when large systems filled with a lot of people, who have no alternative, break in ways that don’t have compensatory measures. It’s coming for the food supply soon too. I’ve been in senior leadership positions in very large organizations multiple times, and I promise you that there are critical workloads not just in tech, but in medicine, defense, etc. who only have one or two poorly paid people who are there to make sure that whatever the system is, doesn’t break. And when it does? Welp tough break. The reality is there should be many people as back up and as compensatory measures however, companies are not incentivized to pay for those back ups because in “normal” times everything looks fine. It’s not broken right now so we don’t need extra support. We’ve all heard the story. The problem I see is that the world is increasingly filled with these unsustainable debt fueled “critical services”, and humans live within dozens of these large complex systems with no direct alternatives. The workers there are holding on by threads because no company can maintain their business in an environment of forever margin chasing (rat race) and all profits go to insulating owners from downside risks rather than making systems more robust to shocks. So the workers are blown out, owners have half a foot out the door in case of emergency and customers and users are just along for the ride. Sounds great |
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...