1.3.6.1.4.1.61513Mar 15

My first (not frying chicken) job - communications engineer at an aluminium smelter taught me that industrial automation systems can impact health and safety. You might think during an outage "it's fine, they can switch to the manual method", but that puts an operator out on the plant floor for longer. More heat, more stress, more chance for an incident. This job taught me more about system reliability that any of my software focused companies since.

When I worked in the electrical industry it taught me that the work I do has an impact on health and safety. A substation loses comms, a field tech has to drive several hours and hundreds of kilometers at night to restore. It might mean that traffic lights are out, hospitals on emergency power. A comms outage might mean cell services stop.

Show thread1.3.6.1.4.1.61513Mar 15

When I moved into software dev environment, I worked on public transport projects. The most boring part - showing users how to get from point A to point B. Guess what? That had an impact on health and safety. Person misses their train/tram/bus to the Dr appointment and can't reschedule - doesn't get their medication filled for a few weeks. Person chooses driving over using PT. Someone might miss their appointment to get a job or visit centerlink/servicesaustralia.

I worked on many government related websites. I'm only a single cog in the system, so you can't blame me for all the terrible gov websites. But I always tried to focus on "if this breaks, it could cause someone a mental breakdown". I'm not sure how many people have had this. I've had it just ordering pizza. That final last straw.

Show thread1.3.6.1.4.1.61513Mar 15
Currently I work in EdTech. I hate that I work somewhere that attaches a dollar sign to students education - but there's many worse places to work, so with many things with life its a compromise. If our platform is down, if there's a mistake on it, if students can't do their homework. assessments, exams, that has an impact on their education. For students and teachers alike this can be stressful. It can have an impact on the students outcomes.
Show thread1.3.6.1.4.1.61513Mar 15
I'm not advocating for perfect code, high redundancy, perfect uptime. People and systems will never be perfect. What I am advocating here is for people to understand what impact they might have. Understand and respect outcomes of your work. For many of us on this platform the people using our work are physically disconnected from us and it's extremely easy for us to loose sight on peoples well-being. If you want to fuck around with the systems that real people use, you better damn make sure it doesn't hurt them. Be loud and proud of your desires to keep people safe.
Show threadI love this, so I

@xssfox *standing ovation*

So many people have lost sight that the IT industry is about making things easier/faster for PEOPLE

Mar 15 at 4:07amWeb
Show threadneoludditeMar 15

@jpm @xssfox Including *yourselves*, which is something that I've had trouble drumming into business and IT people alike. Do a shit job and it not only costs you time and money, but also sanity -- in a field that has waaay more than it's fair share of burnout and stress.

It's also why I tend to rail against languages like PHP, Perl, Javascript, etc. Not because they're kinda terrible languages (they are), but because of the second/third order impacts of the worse-is-better *culture* of those languages. I've burned out 3 times in my career so far: 2 of them involved Perl and 2 involved PHP. It's like people who love running industrial machinery with all the safety guards removed, because those guards are boring and interfere with their personal artistic expression while operating giant spinning saw blades...