Bruce Eckel has a wonderful weblog entry mixing in a personal experiences of dealing with failure in systems that people just assume ‘work’. Here’s an excerpt:
Crested Buttians, perhaps because they are (also) primarily from somewhere else, assume that the systems will continue to work as they always have. You have to be in a situation where you see just how fast things fail to make you take it seriously, I guess.
There’s lots of stories in technology of failed projects (software, IT, hardware, you name it) and it’s good to remember that technology has progressed however stuff can fail and it’s good to sometimes try to keep in mind that this stuff fails. If you’re not prepared it can really catch you flat-footed. It catches all of us since once you lay down something that is ‘infrastructure’ it’s job is to serve to do something else and once it works for awhile people just forget about that.
