Somewhere in there, one of the SREs said something that's stuck with me. Roughly, he said that the concept of human error is useless. Every time a human error escalates into a real problem, the deeper problem is a design flaw. At scale, human errors are a certainty, and, while documentation and training is far from useless, no amount of it can change that fact. It's therefore a critical responsibility of systems designers to design their systems to be resilient to mistakes.
Somewhere in there, one of the SREs said something that's stuck with me. Roughly, he said that the concept of human error is useless. Every time a human error escalates into a real problem, the deeper problem is a design flaw. At scale, human errors are a certainty, and, while documentation and training is far from useless, no amount of it can change that fact. It's therefore a critical responsibility of systems designers to design their systems to be resilient to mistakes.