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Comment by burnerthrow008 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly!

And while we're at it, why stop with CVRs? Software is a key component of all engineering domains today, and thus a critical safety factor.

All MacBooks (the most popular developer machine today) have built-in microphones. We should using them to record all dev conversations (after all, there's zero incremental hardware cost to doing so), as well as all keystrokes of anyone who writes software, 24/7, so that we can retrospectively analyze why they failed to avoid writing buggy code and the decisions that led to it.

Everyone who has had their PII leaked will rejoice, knowing that we can finally "get" those nasty open- and closed-source developers who created CVEs.

"B-b-but, that's different!"

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But it is different. Your message could've had an entirely different tone that would have provided a thoughtful yet tangential analogy. Instead you've chosen a specious strawman approach for some reason.

There's a clear and obvious difference between a self-important person who writes software and a person who pilots hundreds of folks over top of thousands of other folks in a slow and only mildly explosive missile.

That mildly-explosive missile has software running on it too. So do a lot of actual missiles, for that matter.

If we record every action of the pilot of a plane, why wouldn’t we also record every action of the developers who wrote the autopilot software, or the fly-by-wire software?

Because the developers don't need to make snap decisions under stressful conditions with lives at stake. If you can't see the difference, sorry, that's on you.

Making snap decisions under stressful conditions has nothing to do with recording actions for later root cause analysis. If you can’t see the difference, sorry, that’s on you.

Recording every action of a pilot in the performance of their job, vice recording every action of a pilot in their daily goings on. These are two different things.

As a developer, every final action is also recorded in the performance of their job. That's what Git is for, and that history lasts for quite a lot longer than 2 hours.

You’re not seeing the parallels.

The original comment suggested recording every action from the cockpit and using it for analytical data. The final action isn’t the goal. The steps and discussion that got them to the final action is. Hence recording every step the pilot takes, and the equivalent would be also recording every discussion that the software developer made that influenced them to write the code the way they did.

Saying “the git commit is there, that should be good enough to know the result” is like saying “the pilot landed the plane, that should be good enough to know the result”. Why do we even need CVRs at all? The final action is right there, right?

So again, why record everything the pilot says but not everything the developer that wrote the autopilot says?

I think it would be helpful to qualify ‘everything the pilot/developer says’ with ‘in the past 25 hours’.

For a pilot that just flew a 12 hour flight with a malfunction that would be of obvious benefit.

For a developer that introduced a bug 8 months ago, maybe not so much. Even if you recorded every interaction the dev had over that time period nobody would be able to go through everything and get sensible information.

The comment that kicked off this chain of comments wasn’t suggesting the past 25 hours, it was suggesting recording all flights, always, and storing it forever to be analyzed at any date in the future.

I think we already record the git-equivalent of pilot data: telemetry from the plane (the inputs, the actions) are already logged.

If ‘directly responsible for lives’ is the rationale for voice recording pilots in the course of their jobs, and not developers, since developers are not directly responsible, but indirectly responsible, can we also expand the list of professions to include always recording police, firemen, and all medical professionals all the time.

I suspect making sure that surgeons know that anything they say during the course of their job, can and will be held against them in a court of law, will not serve to improve the quality of the work they do.

As if all email/Slack convos aren't already saved and archived...

This is a wildly unserious argument.

It is. 100s of people don't fall from the sky if your laptop experiences a critical error.

Sure they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs

I said laptop...

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