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Software Friction

(www.hillelwayne.com)
141 points saikatsg | 1 comments | 17 Jun 24 06:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.338s | source
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WJW ◴[18 Jun 24 11:13 UTC] No.40716351[source]▶
> What about event planners, nurses, military officers?

As a Dutch ex-Navy officer, we just called this "friction" as everyone had read Von Clausewitz during officer training and was familiar with the nuances of the term. Militaries overwhelmingly address this problem by increasing redundancy, so that there are as few single points of failures as possible. It is very rare to encounter a role that can only be filled by a single person, a well designed military organization will always have a plan for replacing any single individual should they accidentally die.

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pjc50 ◴[18 Jun 24 12:23 UTC] No.40716962[source]▶
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men" -- attr. Napoleon

"I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses" -- attr. Lincoln (exact words vary by source)

It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement.

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1. mcswell ◴[20 Jun 24 02:34 UTC] No.40734334[source]▶
There was a sci-fi story decades ago (probably in Analog) on this theme. A very realistic war game was set up, which two real-world opposing nations decided to use in lieu of losing real men. The friction caught them off guard. The one incident I recall was when one side deployed a biowarfare agent, but the wind changed and they ended up infecting their own troops. There were other incidents of friction.