Fighting the controls (programmers vs pilots) (Daniele Procida)

• Pilots and programmers have some similar human judgement failure modes in extreme situations.
  • Loss of situational awareness,
  • Panic,
  • Faulty mental models,
  • Misjudging cause and effect,
  • Poor decision making.
• Similarity between pair programming and 2-pilot cockpit.
• Programming is a creative craft kind of like writing, very unlike surgery.
• Feedback is very quick.
• But debugging is very private.
• So we are driven to the same short loop and we lose situational awareness because we're too busy fighting the controls.
• When programmers do it, they look foolish, when pilots do it, they die, so pilots figured out better ways to deal with it.

Mitigating loss of situational awareness in aviation

The basic idea is to use simple techniques that reliably work. They can be performed under stress and have minimal cognitive load.

• Checklists (for normal operation and for emergency),
• Communication, explain to another person what you're doing,
• Stop (at least for a short while). Doing nothing is sometimes better than doing random stuff in panic.

What can we do

• We can adopt checklists,
• Communicate explicitly and with the intention to improve our understanding of the situation,
• Stop fighting the controls (in programming it's much cheaper than in piloting).

Q/A

• 15 minute rule (debug for 15 minutes, if you don't solve it, write the problem down, ask someone else).
• SRE methods. We can learn from them.
  • Classify all the past tickets and act on this analysis.
• Can we help this with tooling?