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Quarrelsomeyesterday at 9:39 PM1 replyview on HN

I did an induction at some ISO certified company some years back, reading their docs. A good 50% of them contained significant content that basically read:

> the thing must be in the place where it should be

With no further information e.g. what place, where, how, when, who facilitates that?

> the person who facilitates it, is the person who facilitates it.

Yea thanks. So their ISO accredited process was basically no process. Would have been way better with a talking fox.

So I feel like humans are capable of just as bad. I'd be interested in what answer the Fox could spit out and I kinda wonder where it might fit on the bell curve of all non Gas-Town "auditable" processes. I'm all for skepticism but I feel like it would be more tangible if we instead criticised the response instead of just conjuring it as "definitely awful" because it happens to be on top of a generated stack.

I mean: I don't want it to work, but maybe we're not as good as we think we are, or the stuff we rate as super important is actually way less important with a generated context. As much as I love good code, the thought that gnaws at the back of my head is the truism that some of the most profitable code in history has been some of the "worst" code (e.g. MySpace's janky code base ontop of ColdFusion or Twitter's "Fail Whale" era).

So I'm happy that someone is exploring this space in an open way. I'm just glad I'm not the one finding that out with my face first.


Replies

vidarhyesterday at 10:40 PM

Which ISO certification matters, but the key thing people should be aware of is that the primary value of the certification to customers is that your processes are documented and that deviations are tracked, so that customers can check whether the processes makes sense before signing a contract. It's important not to expect the certification itself to guarantee quality.