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Comment by caminante | Hacker News Reader

The parent is also incorrectly re-phrasing Murphy's Law -- "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

Actual quote:

> “If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.”

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Engineering controls basically mean making it impossible to do something in a way that results in catastrophe.

Good point.

My experience is that everyone thinks their defensive controls are air tight until inevitably they're going through a post-mortem on a failure where someone says, "Whelp...Murphy's Law..."

Pushing buggy software that could result in some expected nonzero number of incidents per year can be done as an intentional tradeoff, any time the cost of incidents is lower than the opportunity cost of moving fast.

Dare I say that most software engineers literally plan to hit Murphy's Law?

If you build websites, and you never get hit by Murphy's Law, it could mean you are being too conservative.

If you build bridges, your job is to make sure you never get hit by Murphy's Law.

I was struggling to explain my point (and still am?)

To your comment, it ultimately comes down to some tolerance and that's exactly what I struggled with.

Nobody cites Murphy's Law when you're in a third world country and the power goes out...for the 100th time in a day.

I can think of some systems that are really fault tolerant, but I can't find an example of some machine that's been flawless despite amazing engineering controls.

I'd be interested to hear why my restatement was incorrect. I'm confident that it's what Murphy meant, mostly because I've read his other laws and that's what I recall as the general through line. But that's was a long time ago and perhaps I'm misremembering or was misinterpreting at the time.

Sorry, didn't mean for my comment to come off mean. I can see how it is pedantic or maybe more subjective opinion.

Your phrasing is right.

I was just doing a quick take on this qualifier:

> which is not prevented by a strong engineering control

I appreciate it, but it didn't come off as mean and I appreciate the correction. Incidentally Murphy apparently didn't write a whole set of laws so I have no idea what I read to that impression. I did some reading and there are interesting interpretations I hadn't considered that are more pessimistic, which is perhaps what you were flagging. Like that when you add more engineering controls, you create new vulnerabilities, and so things will continue to "go wrong".

If I use this phrasing again I'll present as something derived from or analogous to Murphy's Law rather than a "restatement".

> Like that when you add more engineering controls, you create new vulnerabilities, and so things will continue to "go wrong".

Yes! Thanks for the grace.

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