Not to be too glib, but "a bunch of things that should have never been allowed in production, compounded by non-existent monitoring, and poor understanding of how <thing> works" is the cause of most outages.
I believe the focus on LDL as 'bad' has been misguided. It's an improvement from 'all cholesterol is bad', but we just don't understand very much about how it all works, and so as we discover more, we slowly refine our understanding.
A lot of the theory about why LDL is 'bad' is based on the fact that arterial damage is repaired with the stuff, causing plaque. There's no evidence that LDL is causing the damage, just that it has a role in how it's fixed (in an ultimately detrimental way).
Private property entirely depends on violence -- that's not hyperbole, there's ultimately no other compelling force to enforce societal norms and rules (see: police).
It's only our familiarity and compliance with the system that prevents us from encountering that violence.
Literally flight attendants exist to help with the safety of passengers in any sort of abnormal situation. That they serve beverages is just kind of the thing they do when there's not a critical safety function.
If you're a manager, your job is to do things that make you uncomfortable.
Yep, one thing I noticed when I moved into a management role, was that the things that would make you move along as an employee, are the things it's now your job to fix or deal with. Maybe this is obvious, but there's kind of a visceral shift in perception that goes along with it.
As your circle expand, it is impossible not to notice the walls and blockers that are endemic. If one doesn't see this, it's often because that person is in their own little bubble, and not doing much to improve the organization either.
Often, it takes both employees and managers to really make the shifts, over many many years. By the time it happens, the individual contributions are mostly forgotten or employee left long ago.
An experienced CEO joined a mid-sized company that I worked at a few years. His opening line, in his first all hands was a joke about firing the people who were a few minutes late to the call. It was obviously a joke, but you really can't make a worse impression and he was gone within a year.
They are paid millions because once you win the birth lottery, and if you are tall and loud enough, failing upwards becomes the default that is very hard to beat, even if you try.
And it's really, really hard to learn from your mistakes unless someone calls you out on your shit, which almost never happens to these people.
If the CEO came in and was amazing, then she/he'd get paid the same amount.
I mean, it's the exact same with engineers. They get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars because they're "top talent", but experience and resume does not necessarily a good engineer make. You interview and make a guess, but it's not like the best engineers always get paid the most and the worst get paid the least. They all get paid roughly the same.
The only difference is that bad engineers generally don't get fired at the rate that bad CEOs do. But I guess that's because the scale of impact is a lot less, and they're not so easy to identify and blame.
