Grown-up Tech
“Avoid monocultures on large fleets of machines”:
Humans do dumb things. You can either accept that and create systems which are resilient in the face of our limitations, or you can just ignore it and suffer. It’s up to you.
The longer I work with technology the more intent I am on exploring the human side of the equation.
Languages, frameworks, and tools are great things, but they don’t matter when it comes to the day-to-day reality of what people do.
Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.
Bill Gates:
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
In other words: hot new tools won’t fix what’s wrong with your organization. If your tool-users aren’t communicating and collaborating, new tools just multiply the problems that you already have.
Don’t get me wrong — we have unprecedented and amazing tools for collaborating! But at the end of the day we’re just the same old intelligent apes we’ve always been. Technology alone is insuffient for solving group social problems.