This week, one of the videos that stood out to me was Eric Ries, “The Five Whys”. Although the subject of the analogy is programming and engineering, the proposition is one that can relate to many more situations. Ties illustrates that, behind every supposed technical issue, there is actually a human problem that caused it. If one doesn’t find the human problems, aka the root problem, you can’t really make progress.
The example Ries uses is when a server crashes. Upon further investigation, it’s reveled that it’s the fault of an employee who isn’t properly trained in a specific area of code. He isn’t properly trained because the manager doesn’t believe in training. What started as a technical issue was actually a human issue. At each level, you can step in and take action, setting up measures that, upon the revisit of the issue, are immediately brought into play. This saves trying to figure out new prevention action, and makes it easy for people to build databases that address these questions.
This is something I can relate to. Having finished a programming class last semester, when I was testing a Software Engineering degree, it was amusing/painful to observe the “technical issues” experienced by my classmates. I knew that, no matter how right yet wrong my programming looked, it was never the computer’s problem, but rather my own. Nearly every day, someone would complain, saying their program wouldn’t function, and that TestBed (the program that we tested our coding against), was making a mistake. It was a great experience in the art of accepting one’s own mistakes, and figuring out how to solve them, rather than shrouding them in convenient, yet completely wrong, excuses.
No comments:
Post a Comment