News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Risks of Knowing Your Risk by rootusrootus on Friday February 16, 2018 @09:39AM (#16392595)
At the risk (ha!) of a bad car analogy, I've experienced a similar feeling when I was regularly doing used oil analysis on my car. One day the analysis came back and told me I was getting elevated levels of metals that indicated abnormally high bearing wear. From that point forward I worried needlessly about when the motor was going to croak, and I realized that I was not willing to preemptively rebuild it just because an oil analysis showed a higher risk. So it was good for nothing except higher anxiety.

Moral of that story -- I sold the car about 100K miles later and it was still just fine. I've never bothered with the oil analysis since.

Re:The Risks of Knowing Your Risk by iamdave on Friday February 16, 2018 @12:05PM (#16393763)
Software related anecdote: I left a team that at one point, where an unforeseen occurrence, think something like 1 in a million happened, taking our production systems offline. Our decision makers became so risk averse to change for fear of another similar event that we completely stopped innovating and spent three years wrapping ourselves up in tape and saran wrap to protect ourselves from getting hurt again because "risk". The thing that took us down required a pretty trivial version upgrade and we never saw it again, even when creating deliberate conditions for the bug.

I ended up leaving the company, I couldn't spend another year mitigating other people's terror, the word "risk" became a trigger word, other engineers started leaving in droves and eventually, they shut down months later.

Re:The Risks of Knowing Your Risk by trsse on Friday February 16, 2018 @01:08PM (#16394330)
You need to reach that Zen state of mind with your "service engine soon" lights to own a used car.