Post AztknKbl7lofI5vcWW by KimSJ@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by KimSJ@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #AztknEa7WwwMbH7E8W by KimSJ@mastodon.social
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       Engineers spend a lot of time anticipating possible problems and patching round them before they actually happen. The best known example of this was the so-called Millennium Bug: hundreds of thousands of hours spent checking and fixing computer systems to make sure that the year 2000 arrived without any disasters.Politicians are the complete opposite: they seem to wait for disasters to happen before they even begin to think about solutions. Why do we accept this dumb, irresponsible behaviour?
       
 (DIR) Post #AztknK31Cw1jYLfsNE by guigsy@mstdn.social
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       @KimSJ I worked in a team that took over the massive IT modernisation of a complex manufacturing line. We introduced proper IT processes for requirements, testing and deployment. Went from IT regularly causing production losses to no losses in 3 years.New department manager took over and couldn't see the value of the expensive team, what did we do? So many people for what is obviously an easy job. Team was disbanded and most people left. Within a month, they were back to regular losses.
       
 (DIR) Post #AztknKbl7lofI5vcWW by KimSJ@mastodon.social
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       @guigsy A great example of the Kimbeau effect… if things go smoothly, people come to believe the status-quo is inevitable, and start to focus on the small irritations. So they turn politics upside down in an attempt to fix the minor stuff, without realising that they will wreck the big things that way. That’s why people vote out left-wing Governments.
       
 (DIR) Post #AztknKjCg5lrfBPZ7w by KimSJ@mastodon.social
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       Worse still, we now have politicians claiming that the Millennium Bug was an over-hyped panic — “see, nothing happened, it was all a fuss about nothing”. Why aren’t such statements laughed out of court?I’m thinking about this in the context of Covid. People claiming the lockdowns were unnecessary, etc. If politicians had done enough to avoid a global pandemic, would anyone have thanked them? I think not. Instead they would have been ridiculed for ‘over-reacting’. Who’d be a politician!.