1
Poor Deming never stood a chance
This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…
Surfing Complexity
Lorin Hochstein's ramblings about software, complex systems, and incidents.
- Popular posts
- 16
- Total points
- 2,812
- HN comments
- 1,458
- Rank
- #518 personal
Visit surfingcomplexity.blog → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2020 – Jul 2026
Software Engineering 12Career & Management 7Systems & Performance 5Tech Industry & Business 3AI & Machine Learning 2Tools & Productivity 1
2
The carefulness knob
A play in one act Dramatis personae EM, an engineering manager TL, the tech lead for the team X, an engineering manager from a different team Scene 1: A meeting room in an office. The walls are ado…
3
The illegible nature of software development talent
Here’s another blog post on gathering some common threads from reading recent posts. Today’s topic is about the unassuming nature of talented software engineers. The first thread was a …
4
Resilience requires helping each other out
A common failure mode in complex systems is that some part of the system hits a limit and falls over. In the software world, we call this phenomenon resource exhaustion, and a classic example of th…
5
The danger of hidden functional roles
There’s a collection of friends that I have a standing videochat with every couple of weeks. We had been meeting at 8am, but several people developed conflicts at that time, including me. I h…
6
You're missing your near misses
FAA data shows 30 near-misses at Reagan Airport – NPR, Jan 30, 2025 The amount of attention an incident gets is proportional to the severity of the incident: the greater the impact to the organizat…
7
The Ambiguity of Real Work
All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system.Dr. Richard I. Cook, How Complex Systems Fail There’s a wonderful book by the late urban planning professo…