Paranoia Will Destroy You
Music to hum along with while reading: “Destroyer” — The Kinks
AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) went down yesterday (Sept 28th 2022). Not totally, but enough for me to have a bad day.
The (Back) Story
I noticed the AWS issues at first by a slow down uploading to ECR. Then odd failures as I was pushing up image-based Lambda Functions I was testing out. I assumed it was my code, which is 99.995% of the time the correct assumption.
When one is in the middle of development the last thing one wants is shaky ground beneath one’s feet.
One needs to trust that the world is sane, because one is diving deep and needs to focus.
So yesterday was particularly frustrating, as one of the bedrocks of my development became fractured. It was one of the last conclusions for me to reach, as I went about investigating the culprit of my problems. It didn’t help that it was a deployment problem which caused increased time delays as I ‘dev-looped’ modifying things to try to fix the problem.
I eventually reached the point where I had to stop development as I could make no further progress.
Lesson: Trust WILL BE (L)EARNED
Today I no longer trust AWS to the degree I did before. It is going to take days and weeks of consistent problem-free usage for me to stop checking the AWS health status when I have an issue. Trust takes time to be re-earned.
This is unfortunate as paranoia has a cognitive, stress, and time cost.
I need to trust, so I eventually will trust, as the complexity is more than I can handle otherwise. It is inefficient and takes too much effort to remain in a heightened state of paranoia.
Lesson: Balanced (Dis)trust
Like many things there is no ‘right’ level of paranoia. It is a constant adjustment. One can only get better at balancing.
I have trust in most things. I don’t even notice my surroundings most of the time. My brain’s job in many ways is to filter out as much as possible. I don’t have enough neurons to spare. Living in an environment I can trust is a key to success. It isn’t just comfortable it is vital.
Building trust therefore is quite important. Not because it somehow makes the thing more trustworthy, but because it means I no longer have to pay attention to it.
TODO: Actively Build Trust
This experience and my analysis of it has made me come to realize that while trust does indeed ‘just happen’ with time, I can also influence the game a bit.
I’m beginning to see trust as such a vital component to efficiency and productivity, that actively working to build trust is worthwhile.
Sort of like going to the gym to build muscles, that aren’t strictly needed but never-the-less provide health benefits.
Summary
Trust matters more than one might think.
Trust is so important in fact, that taking the time to build trust and to build a trustworthy environment is worth putting serious thought and activity into.
IMHO one should not ‘put up with’ or otherwise accept a situation where trust is fragile. Either take action to make it better, or move away from an untrustworthy environment.
Originally published at https://github.com.
