#4 in System theory books
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Reddit mentions of Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
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Reddit mentions: 3
We found 3 Reddit mentions of Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. Here are the top ones.
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Length | 7.874 Inches |
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It's funny to me (not ha-ha funny) that the founding fathers were prepared for the eventuality that the people would elect a bad President, but they didn't predict that both of the mechanisms they put in place to prevent this - the electoral college and Congress - might also be bad at the same time.
There a great book called Systemantics about how systems fail, and in it the author talks about how catastrophic failures happen when one safety mechanism fails and only then do we discover that all of the backup safety mechanisms have been failing for years and no one knew it because that last one was holding. In this case, that last one is our Presidents being basically good people and holding to the traditions of the office, and for that matter to basic human decency.
All of which is a long way of agreeing with you: We need to codify in law a lot of the things that Presidents (and candidates) have traditionally done voluntarily. For example, releasing tax returns.
I joined the USAF in 1981, became a contractor in 1986, joined the Air Force C-17 program office at Wright-Patterson in 1988, and I've been there as a Unix sysadmin ever since. Everything you've seen here about gov't IT is true.
I wrote a how-to on something many years ago and mentioned that I'd been an admin for around 20 years. The best comment I got was someone saying "If I'm still an admin after 20 years, would someone please write a program to kill me?"
How to avoid strangling the person in the next cubicle? These two links made a big difference for me:
Once I understood that the DoD (and any other large system I have to deal with) acts the way it does mainly because of size rather than malice, my job got a lot better.
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