# That Wild Ask A Manager Story - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

<https://jacobian.org/2022/feb/14/that-wild-aam-story/>

- Host: [jacobian.org](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/jacobian.org/)
- Saved: February 17, 2022 (2022-02-17T23:48:05Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d9ff2d3ee678/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d9ff2d3ee678.json

## What Jamie wrote

A fairly preposterous experience in a hiring process. When asked how to stop it, Kaplan-Moss's response is:

> A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?”
> 
> Nothing. I would do nothing. I would not try to prevent candidates from getting someone else to pose as them during interviews.
> 
> The premise here is simple: **designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological.**

That is a tremendous statement. One that should be put somewhere to reflect upon occasionally. Organizations usually remember this, but sometimes forget it. And technologists have all the wrong instincts here… 

> When we design software systems, we learn to think deeply about corner cases. We code defensively, making sure our systems handle all sorts of uncommon events. Amazon promises 99.999999999% reliability on objects stored in S3, and even then I’ve written code that handles the 0.000000001% chance that an object disappears.
> 
> Designing human systems is different. Computers don’t have emotions; I don’t need to worry insulting the vast majority of S3 objects when I defensively check integrity every time. But humans are different; when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority. There are times – and this is one of them – where addressing outlandish behavior requires steps that are just unacceptable.

Engineers must design to accommodate all the potential outcomes, which makes sense in a world of machine and logic. When we leave logic and enter the messy organic human space we need to design differently.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT212: Weekly Thing #212 / Words, Mermaid, Beats](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/212/), Featured

## Same host

- [A reading list for new engineering managers - Jacob Kaplan-Moss](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/de93e6459f1e/) (jacobian.org, April 15, 2021)
- [My Software Estimation Technique - Jacob Kaplan-Moss](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/c8d70f160530/) (jacobian.org, June 3, 2021)

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://jacobian.org/2022/feb/14/that-wild-aam-story/