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by krisoft
532 days ago
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Framing it as an "idiots vs not idiots" is the wrong way to think about it. When you are working with the PTO you know you are working with the PTO. You are standing next to the tractor. The PTO should always be handled with the understanding that it can be dangerous. Here people are doing something mundane, everyday and not dangerous (shutting down their own laptop) and suddenly it becomes dangerous because they mixed up the terminal they typed their command in. It is as if sometimes your alarm clock would be replaced with a PTO. Your alarm beeps, you reach out to turn it off as always and bam your hand is gone. That is the situation we are talking about here. > I think because we have internalized an owner/management point of view that workers are fungible and training is a waste This is not something you can train out of people. Your best trained, and most skillful operator can do this mixup. This is not that someone doesn't know what "sudo shutdown -h now" does. They do very much know it. Like the palm of their hand. What they don't notice is that they are typing it into the wrong terminal. |
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Like, yes, I am a console jockey and prefer working in shells with a tiling window manager, keyboard only control and such. I will however always shutdown my workstation with the mouse (or trackball rather) through some UI of the desktop manager, or a desktop manager specific way.
Otherwise, I am normalizing the use of sla-dangerous commands like "shutdown". It takes that little bit of fear and respect out of those commands if you use them daily for no good reason or if better choices exist. Like, don't turn your alarm off by cutting it's wire and re-soldering it later.
And similar, if I need to reboot production systems, I'll much rather reach to some control interface of the virtualization, or use something like ansible to dry-run these dangerous tasks first.
Or it terrifies me how care-free some people are with "sudo rm -rf". I've caused myself so much pain with rm. "sudo -u app-user rm -rf" is right there, or even better, "sudo -u app-user find -name foo -print > stuff; cat stuff" and later some "xargs -i rm < stuff" and "xargs -v rm < stuff". Yes it takes a minute more to do, but it prevents ... accidents.