Hawaii fires employee who sent false ballistic missile alert | Hacker News Reader

Hawaii fires employee who sent false ballistic missile alert

theverge.com

So Governor Ige claimed the employee pushed the wrong buttons and followed up with the screen capture showing how confusing the menu system was. With the story having changed dramatically to a misinformed, intentional alert, the state government has burned their credibility. If there's anything to learn here, it'll come from the federal investigation.

The obvious comparison for the HN crowd is the gitlab database outage last year. Fascinating to see how they responded compared to the government of Hawaii. https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o...

How to ensure a mistake is repeated: fire the one guy who will never make the same mistake twice.

According to officials, this is his third strike:

> State officials also revealed that the employee who was terminated on Friday “has performance issues,” and had confused drills with real-world events in at least two previous incidents. The report said colleagues had complained about such issues in the past.

I’m not totally convinced that absolves the system/UX. It seems more like an excuse/justification.

Yeah, we don't know the whole story. It's not impossible that this is a situation involving both systemic flaws and someone who is just intractably and unapologetically incompetent -- for instance, someone who has habitually browsed non-work-related websites and been warned against doing so, but the harm of the distraction was never actually a danger until this fake alert incident.

For me, what partially redeems this employee's firing is that the head administrator was also terminated. If this "button-pusher" deserves to be punished for incompetence, then whoever thought it was OK to have such an incompetent person pushing the button also deserves to be punished.

How do you repeatedly mistake a drill for real-life? The source was unclear whether this person had a mental break (weird but understandable) or s/he actually had some source saying a missile was inbound. The latter would be so interesting as to what convinced the person of the missile.

This explains why the button pusher wouldn’t cooperate with the investigation.

Also good to see that responsible managers were also canned / disciplined.

Can’t wait for the bunch of articles talking about UX wasn’t the problem and there’s no correcting for insane users.

A good Ux will correct for users with mental issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule

The FCC report said that the message that was played as part of a drill said something like, "Exercise Exercise Exercise [Missile inbound message] This is not a drill. Exercise Exercise Exercise." So it was contradictory. But everyone else figured it out.

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