Look at the analysis of the JFK, Jr crash in 1999:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Martha's_Vineyard_plane_c...

> The probable cause of the crash was "the pilot's failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation".

At some point there's not much else to do. Pilot exceeded their training and flew into the water. You could try to prevent that with more and more autopilots and warnings, but at some point pilots have to be able to fly the thing on manual and need to have the actual training for the conditions. I doubt the modern NTSB would be able to say anything better.

The prompts that you have setup also won't stop you from doing a `sudo shutdown -r now` in production quickly one day on autopilot (and typing sudo doesn't help much at all because it is now so common and you probably do that on preprod as well). STOP AND THINK is still going to be the best tool in your toolbox.

And in addition to having been a system administration since the early 90s (and worked at Amazon for 5 years) I'm also a cave diver. There's a variety of different methods in cave/technical diving to avoid breathing the wrong gas at the wrong depth. The best one is probably just to simply label all your bottles with your MOD, always analyze your gas and have a gas analysis sticker on the tank that matches the MOD sticker, then to always go through gas switching procedure with your buddy and validate MOD and analysis sticker every time you do a gas switch (even if you think you're not carrying any gas that is outside of the range where you're diving that day). Alternatives like different colored regulators or carrying gas on different sides run into trouble with exceptional procedures when regulators fail or tanks wind up getting dropped and picked up and put on the wrong side. You can then wind up following "correct" gas switching procedure at the gas switch time and still die. The best solution anyone has come up with has just been to always verify gas contents before sticking it into your mouth -- stop and think every single time. Adding anything else is generally creating more of an overcomplication that causes more additional secondary problems than it solves.

> a better design would have prevented the mistake.

You still need to show that a "better" design actually does stop the mistakes. Does having the stars and forks listed in the message really do that much or do people who are autopilot not reading still just hit submit? Has anyone really measured that?

I do not share your unbridled optimism that the perfect UI/UX design is out there which solves all problems and has no unintended consequences, and one of the unintended consequences I think is social which is that we learn to expect that if we screwed up that someone else should have stopped us.

And I learned that early growing up on systems where deletion was largely permanent and people didn't have backups (although I did get paid some money in high school to manually undelete files on an Apple floppy disk that someone else had nuked by accident), so I learned to think through permanent actions early. And I didn't learn to blame someone else for my own failure. I leveraged that at Amazon and ran all kinds of nasty commands in prod on a daily basis and never destroyed the company (all of that was done in the service of standardizing the configuration management of the systems and in the long run reducing the amount that prod needed to be touched, but early Amazon had a chicken-and-egg problem with a massive production deployment and no good standardization).

Another good example is the Union Street I5 exit in Seattle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeFY9u69tkE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q39uIXLh030

There's nothing much more to be done about the UI/UX of that exit. People are already driving past signs tell them to slow down to 20mph and they're driving at freeway speeds straight at a large concrete wall with no sense of self preservation. You could argue that there should be flashing lights which turn on when people are coming in too hot, but the 11foot8 bridge channel shows just how useless that is (and in Seattle they dropped the speed limits down to 25 mph without any road diets and added those radar speed limit signs that everyone just ignores now, so don't bother suggesting something like that). They aren't going to be able to do anything about reengineering that exit because its stuck in the middle of Downtown Seattle and they'd need to demolish too many structures. IMO, the problem there is that people are actually too used to being able to take exits at highway speeds without slowing down and can't recognize an exit where they can't--better "UI/UX" everywhere else causes problems where you can't retrofit it in. Any accident analysis that goes beyond individual driver responsibility should just lead to lax testing and certification standards and no recertification at all, and the way we treat driving as a Right and not a privilege.

And going back to IT Operations, the problem that I have with blameless portmortems (or whatever less dramatic term is in favor these days) is that most often the blame should fall on management and that lets them off the hook. The standard form for dealing with post-incident analysis should include a field for what decisions of management and what business prioritization led to the incident. Yeah, we shouldn't be blaming engineers most of the time (although given something along the lines of a bell curve in competency, there have to exist operational engineers who should just be encouraged to find other jobs one way or another), but the way to stop doing that shouldn't necessarily to stop entirely, but to be a bit more accurate about why these failures are happening. Although to be fair, perfect operations or perfect security is neither desirable or attainable by any organization. But again that points to the fact that perfect UX/UI to avoid incidents is not going to be attainable (in general "perfect" anything is not attainable -- its up there with drug-free societies and worlds without any abortion).