> explaining to him why he shouldn't press the button won't prevent anyone else from making the same mistake.
How I interpret the point is: don't fix people, fix tool.
You can't tell someone not to break the system, you need to make the system less easy to break, labels on buttons, confirmation dialogs, no double negatives, approvals if need be.
Reminds me of a deployment with a customer (some 15y ago), I wasn't allowed to "touch prod" myself so I was sitting next to a button pusher doing what I was telling him to do (irony...). At some point there was some trickery involved to reboot HA instances one at a time rather than simultaneously, and you had to press "No" when prompted if you wanted to reboot. Before the dialog showed up, I pre-conditioned the guy, telling him "it's going to ask if you want to reboot, say no. Whatever you do, do not click on yes". This wasn't the first time he deployed. He said "oh, ok" then sure enough clicked on yes, and the IT police was in our room 2 minutes later because of a prod outage we just caused.
I have thought many times of what could have prevented that - allowing me to deploy myself, doing more training to that guy, finding a competent replacement to him, more documentation. There is no process that would have worked better to fix the issue than finding a way to remove this dialog box - today that would be done through automation.
Also, a good postmortem process ought to treat "Why didn't we do this in time" as a problem to solve, too. (To be fair I don't immediately know of good examples of this.)
I like to think SWEs are in creative businesses... But this doesn't always hold true...
The whole point is CYA doesn't work. Its not trying to make it idiot proof, it's trying to remove the idiot from being involved at all.
When your employer does the same thing, it leads to “good tools with sensible affordances and guard rails” for competent responsible people.
Why is that?
A finding of "the process was reasonable and the individual wasn't" or "a process guaranteed to stop this kind of action would be unreasonably heavy" may sometimes need to be on the table.
My employer does a reasonable job with this. Our tools usually make the path of least resistance the right thing. We have guardrails that help prevent accidents. But at the end of the day, our controls presume competence and good faith, and there's always an "I know what I'm doing" button. Actions taken after pressing it incur a bit more personal responsibility.