Knowledge and Power: A Sociotechnical Systems Discussion on...
summary
Series of four cross-disciplinary interviews claim that knowledge is partial, tacit and unevenly distributed, and that incidents are the best method to surface that tacit expertise. Concrete failures: a pipeline migration that omitted a missing wait state which published schema-changing data, a false-positive canary that blocked safe code rollout, and a few-hour ads personalization outage. Tools discussed include observability dashboards, telemetry and workflow managers; organizational levers include KTLO vs OKRs and platform abstraction increasing incident complexity.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:14Knowledge and Power
- 3:40Systems Perspective
- 6:24Incident Investigation
- 10:31The Role of Knowledge
- 12:22The Importance of Experience
- 16:24Qualitative Analysis
- 20:26Dashboards
- 24:57Power
- 25:50Management
- 27:47Pressures and constraints
- 30:37OKRs
- 32:26Systems Thinking
- 33:11The Future
- 34:32Implications for Software Systems
- 35:52Regulation
- 38:36Call to Action
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