Originally shared by Chris Jones
John Allspaw on counterfactuals, postmortems, losing $460M, and the difference between investigation for regulation and investigation for understanding:
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In between reading copious amounts of indignation surrounding whatever is suboptimal about http://healthcare.gov, you may or may not have noticed the SEC statement regarding the Knight Capital accident that took place in 2012.
This Release No. 70694 is a document that contains many details about the accident, and you can read what looks like on the surface to be an in-depth analysis of what went wrong and how best to prevent such an accident from happening in the future.
You may believe this document can serve as a ‘post-mortem’ narrative. It cannot, and should not.
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http://www.kitchensoap.com/2013/10/29/counterfactuals-knight-capital/