Gettiers in software engineering (2019)

I wasn’t aware there was a term for this or that this was not common knowledge - for me I refer to them as “if I fix this, it will break EVERYTHING” cases that come up in my particular line of work frequently, and my peers generally tend to understand as well. Cause/effect in complex symptoms is of course itself complex, which is why the first thing I typically do in any environment is set up metrics and monitoring. If you have no idea what is going on at a granular level, you’ll quickly jump to bad conclusions and waste a lot of time aka $.

I’ve come across (possibly written) code that upon close examination seems to only work accidentally — that there are real failures which are somehow hidden by behavior of other systems.

The classic and oft heard “How did this ever work?”