Comment

Comment by madrox

When I started my first coding job, I once made the joke that "testing is hard. I'll just push the code to production and see what happens." An old, crusty engineer just looked at me and said, "you're the kind of person that gets people killed."

I feel like 99% of the engineers who comment on HN don't work in fields where their technology could kill someone if it messes up. If an error meant someone's death, you'd probably think a little harder for committing. That's why I'm not taking anyone who calls this "draconian" or derisively "risk averse" seriously.

Being a safety-first industry is not a punch line. Life is stochastic, not deterministic, and the FAA exists to add as many 9s to the likelihood of success as possible. Sorry your fun is ruined, but when I fly in a plane I don't want to be worrying if some hobbyist with more money than accountability will put my life at risk because they wanted to make a cool video to put on YouTube.

parent madrox 8 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton