Review: Crisis Engineering
It will surprise no one who knows me that I do not read a lot of management books. And if you don’t know me, I’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 create them.
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 healthcare.gov 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’ve seen clearly.
I should be a little careful with what I mean by clearly. If references to Dune, the novel not one of the movies, are clarifying and an isolated reference to ptrace output provokes an “I see you” reaction, they’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’re talking to you, you’ll understand they’re talking to you.
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.
No single book can assess a topic like this, but I walked away with a lot to think about.
Recommended.