alt Hacker NewsThe assumption that moving slower and more bureaucratically increases safety and reliability is one of the most harmful myths out there.
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In fact, it's created a bunch of risks. Like the fact that nobody manufacturers floppy disks or floppy disk readers anymore.
I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.
Yup, it can create a situation where you have a huge incentive towards workarounds and hacky fixes because doing it properly incurs huge costs. This is especially bad when a fundamentally quite bad design makes it through certification (most processes don't really prevent this).
I feel a bit weird that I'm fairly certain that I read this discussion a while ago, in another post...
Creating a rigorous process to ensure safety will create somewhat of a bureaucracy.
But creating a bureaucracy doesn't mean you've created a rigorous process to ensure safety.
Presumably such a confident assertion is based on sufficient actual experience with slower safety protocols such that you can state, positively, that faster-moving processes produce safer, human-life critical, systems... ?
You really, really need to work in industrials controls before your opinion carries weight on this - there are plenty of 40 year old systems humming along keeping the world turning that are bulletproof reliable.
'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.
But moving faster and without accountability is generally worse.
In a perfect world, we would move at a steady pace, as to keep up with the world but without rushing, and people would be accountable without a heavy bureaucratic processes.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in practice, at least not for long, so between the two, we usually favor the slow and bureaucratic process when safety and reliability matter.