> This idea of digging deeper into the circumstance and environment that an engineer found themselves in is called looking for the “Second Story”. In Post-Mortem meetings, we want to find Second Stories to help understand what went wrong.
— Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture,
https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
> Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. … Blameless culture originated in the healthcare and avionics industries where mistakes can be fatal. These industries nurture an environment where every "mistake" is seen as an opportunity to strengthen the system. When postmortems shift from allocating blame to investigating the systematic reasons why an individual or team had incomplete or incorrect information, effective prevention plans can be put in place. You can’t "fix" people, but you can fix systems and processes to better support people making the right choices when designing and maintaining complex systems.
— Site Reliability Engineering — Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/postmortem-cult...
>Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.... We have modified this tool to remove capacity more slowly and added safeguards to prevent capacity from being removed when it will take any subsystem below its minimum required capacity level. This will prevent an incorrect input from triggering a similar event in the future.
Airplane pilots are licensed, certified, trained, and regulated. There's a clear floor to who is allowed in the cockpit (barring extreme emergencies, e.g., incapacitation of a pilot).
By contrast, software is made available to pretty much the entire world. And it turns out that two thirds of all adults have "poor", "below poor", or no computer skills at all. Which is to say, the qualifications floor is nonexistent.
If you're designing a one-size-fits-all system, you've got to design for this. The results, I'd argue, are ... not particularly satisfactory.
I'm not saying "don't design for the user in mind", or "don't dismiss user error". But rather, than when your floor is zero, you're going to have a remarkably difficult challenge.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
True usability is about helping people make the correct decision, not just being smooth and frictionless. (See Don Norman's classic example of fire escapes that send people into basements to be trapped.)
The end result is a beginner can do a tutorial exercise in 20 minutes instead of 30, while any true day to day work in the software takes 4 hours instead of 2.
That doesn't mean they couldn't put an "advanced mode" setting/option that makes the UI streamlined towards users like yourself, though.
Understanding that if a human made this mistake, another future human will likely make the exact same mistake, they push to understand _why_ an airline captain that should know made this error. Then try to correct for that.
If every crash was written off as "the captain should have known better", aviation would not be nearly as safe as it is.