{"id":3439,"date":"2026-09-26T18:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T02:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2026-09-26T18:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T02:50:00","slug":"review-crisis-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=3439","title":{"rendered":"Review: Crisis Engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It will surprise no one who knows me that I do not read a lot of management books.  And if you don&#8217;t know me, I&#8217;m surprised you care about what I think about anything.  I quite liked <em>Crisis Engineering<\/em>, though and I even think I learned some things about technical systems and the institutions that  create them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The authors, Marina Nitze , Matthew Weaver, and Mikey Dickerson have been in the trenches.  They do the kinds of things they discuss here for a living and those kinds of things are rescue <code>healthcare.gov<\/code> in a few months.  This kind of thing is interesting to me, because anyone technical has to occasionally wade into a trash fire and help put it out.  If you care about the human systems that deal successfully with that, the authors have done a good job explaining what they&#8217;ve seen clearly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I should be a little careful with what I mean by clearly.  If references to <em>Dune<\/em>, the novel not one of the movies, are clarifying and an isolated reference to <code>ptrace<\/code> output provokes an &#8220;I see you&#8221; reaction, they&#8217;re super clear.  I also think there are shibboteths for other components of their audience in there as well.  The point is that if they&#8217;re talking to you, you&#8217;ll understand they&#8217;re talking to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Beyond the conversational tone, they have done the homework to support their intuitions about institutional (and technical) behavior.  If something sounds crazy, it gives the reader a thread to pull on to assess it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No single book can assess a topic like this, but I walked away with a lot to think about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It will surprise no one who knows me that I do not read a lot of management books. And if you don&#8217;t know me, I&#8217;m surprised you care about what I think about anything. I quite liked Crisis Engineering, though and I even think I learned some things about technical systems and the institutions that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-general","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3439"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3442,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions\/3442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}