> a job where 95% of the time is spent waiting for an emergency to react to.
this describes quite accurately the work of many people maintaining computer systems
this describes quite accurately the work of many people maintaining computer systems
I've had two "Please call me, it's broke" calls just this morning!
I get the same issue where I work. The client states that "everything is broken," but it often turns out that their own servers are down (or sometimes our API guys made a breaking change and I wasn't informed, but that's not common anymore). I find this stuff out when I get to work in the morning, because they certainly aren't calling me directly.
I log my interactions with my supervisor, he will occasionally check with me to follow up but I can fix 99% of what they call me about on my own. If I need help, it's usually just expert knowledge that I can ask around the office for.
But of course other devs have different roles and workflows.
Nobody wanted to rip out the old problematic systems and start over. So I left. You should do the same. Plenty of jobs out there where you can grow and actually build high quality solutions.
when the number of officers is too low and there's too much crime, the people demand that the government hire more.
so government does that. and crime goes down.
then the public notices all these police officers "doing nothing" and complains about wasted government resources.
so, naturally, they demand a reduction in the number of officers.
and so it goes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
But in the antibiotics example, it's the other way around. The results are ignored in spite of the cause ("I feel better, therefore I'm done"). That one could also just be regular old ignorance, but that's a boring topic of discussion.
It doesn't perfectly apply because technically, the system does not merely have two states, but the failure state is still very reminiscent of what is described here.
As kcorbitt points out in a sibling comment, differential equations are also a very powerful mechanism for understanding these phenomena, even when they are continuously approximating a discrete function like "number of police officers". Unfortunately, the standard treatment of this incredibly practical and important topic in college is terrible, and people come out with no understanding of how important it is to understanding the real world. As a really simple example, anywhere you can find a -dx^2/dt^2 term, you are almost certain to experience oscillations; they can be drowned out but it takes a lot, to put it in intuitive terms. With so many such terms in the world, there's a lot of oscillations that you simply can't avoid. I tend to believe our economy oscillations more than it absolutely has to for various reasons, for instance, but the idea I've sometimes seen proposed that it shouldn't oscillate at all is impractical. Too many terms like that in the world.
Another common lack of understanding that is particularly prevalent within middle management is the trade-off between efficiency and resilience, the application of this to the finacial system is discussed at length in [0].
As the Red Queen said to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."