Compare most university or office workplaces, contrast 1960s-era NASA or a Google datacenter.
I can’t speak towards Google datacenters, but the handling around recent AWS outages (eg. not reporting the status on the status page until VPs approve) suggest that they’re not a contrasting example here.
Definitily Google is well aware of the issues around moral mazes and does invest in preventing them.
For example there’s a strong blameless culture where postmortems are about fixing the systemic issues that caused the problem, not finding out who to blame. It’s repeatedly iterated that many engineers have actually been given a bonus even if they accidentally cause an outage if they work quickly and effectively to fix it once they notice it.
That doesn’t always work (e.g. the Damore incident was a big slap in the face to this culture), but at least they recognise the problem and are trying to fix it, unlike most organisations.
I can’t speak towards Google datacenters, but the handling around recent AWS outages (eg. not reporting the status on the status page until VPs approve) suggest that they’re not a contrasting example here.
Definitily Google is well aware of the issues around moral mazes and does invest in preventing them.
For example there’s a strong blameless culture where postmortems are about fixing the systemic issues that caused the problem, not finding out who to blame. It’s repeatedly iterated that many engineers have actually been given a bonus even if they accidentally cause an outage if they work quickly and effectively to fix it once they notice it.
That doesn’t always work (e.g. the Damore incident was a big slap in the face to this culture), but at least they recognise the problem and are trying to fix it, unlike most organisations.
Oh yeah, that’s classic maze behavior if true.