"Prior to Okta, David was the Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer at Symantec" So, his prior experience is as CSO at a company who's principal business is selling fake security products. Ho, boy.
You can read plenty of behavioral signal from how candidates interact with interviewers while solving hard technical challenges. But many companies don't really invest much into training interviewers how to effectively interview and gather useful signal or calibrating their evaluation to the goals and standards of the organization.
coe.amazon.com if you're inside. Larry must have paid for this article. Some things it doesn't say: Large database migrations are hard -- especially so when there's been many years of accumulated dependency on the prior data store/model. Amazon conducts a lot of CoEs -- I suspect more than 1000/yr. Hundreds of prior CoEs implicate behavior of relational databases (and particularly Oracle) at scale -- there's a reason Amazon has an expensive multi-year program to get off Oracle.
Wikipedia remembers: "The Scroll Lock key was meant to lock all scrolling techniques, and is a vestige of the original IBM PC keyboard. In the original design, Scroll Lock was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. When the Scroll Lock mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In this usage, Scroll Lock is a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released."
It still works that way too in a real vtty. Hit scroll lock to scroll through the text buffer at the terminal in a text-only session with the up and down arrows on BSD. Very handy.
Yes, root cause analysis and corrective action should only to be done with Cook's insights in mind.
"Post-accident attribution to a ‘root cause’ is nearly always wrong."
"Post-accident remedies usually increase the coupling and complexity of the system. This increases the potential number of latent failures and also makes the detection and blocking of accident trajectories more difficult."
How Complex Systems Fail is short but loaded with value; if you haven't read it, go do so now!
I agree with you. Root cause analysis should be informed by an understanding of complex, dynamic systems. The article's assumption, however, that RCA and systems thinking are somehow at odds is incorrect. Root cause doesn't necessarily, as the author implies, mean a single, isolated cause. It can designate the linking of "multiple contributors" as the author advocates.
