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#systemsthinking#threemileisland#blamelesspostmortem

Who Destroyed Three Mile Island? - Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer Austin 2018

LeadDev

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2020 to 2024.
  • Presented by Nickolas Means
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

762K views8 years ago4 recommendations

Tools and practiceSystems programmingSRE and incidentsCode review and teamworkObservability and monitoring

Nickolas Means reconstructs the Three Mile Island nuclear accident to show how systemic failures and poor interface design, rather than individual operator error, cause disasters.

On March 28, 1979, at exactly 4 o’clock in the morning, control rods slammed into the reactor core of Three Mile Island Unit #2, halting the nuclear reaction because of a fault in the reactor cooling system. At , the automated emergency cooling system activated as the reactor core temperature continued to rise. At , one of the plant operators made the befuddling decision to switch off the emergency cooling system, dooming the reactor to partial meltdown. Why? When something bad happens, it’s easy to just blame someone and move on. Taking the time to find the systemic causes, though, will not only help keep the problem from repeating, it will enable you to build the psychological safety necessary for your team to truly collaborate. Let’s let the story of Three Mile Island teach us how to make our teams stronger through systems thinking and just culture.

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a classic talk on systems thinking, blameless postmortems, and understanding the systemic causes of complex failures.

Huggernauton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Type in the exact number of machines to proceed”

Nickolas Means has an absolutely wonderful set of talks on themes like this. Particularly relevant here I think, is his talk: "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?" - which goes through the events that occurred at the nuclear power plant, the systemic problems, and how to find the "second stories" of why failures occurred. link to this video

lawrjoneon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August”

There's an excellent talk from Nick Means (GitHub) called "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?". Link: link to this video One thing it discusses is how the alerts inside the control hub were so noisy, and were logged via a reasonably slow printer, that the alerts which suggested the reactor was in serious trouble only printed hours after you could do anything. And the alert light that said "shits fucked" was placed right next to the light about an elevator being out of order. Human error is rarely intentional, and even if it is, a system that fails in response has missed the mark. The talk explains the amazing finds made by the government committee hired to investigate the incident, once they left the ide…

codebeakeron Hacker News • Recommends

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…a fan of nuclear power considering the alternatives, but it needs to be done with different, safer reactor designs and probably with new branding because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never intended for land) 1: link 2: link to this video…

tudorwon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Why you've never been in a plane crash”

Thanks for that, I really appreciated this breakdown of the accident at Three Mile Island and the concept of 'the second story' with regards systems thinking; link to this video

u/eat_those_lemonsin r/functionalprogramming • Mentions

On “Object-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster”

I would reply that the idea of placing the people behind the problem is not the solution. There might be some people who manage to break free and succeed but that doesn't mean that the system is okay. See this great talk on managing developer teams and teams in general and about the 3 mile island disaster: link to this video (lead dev three mile island disaster)