this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Many people need to shift away from this blaming mindset and think about systems that prevent these things from happening. I doubt anyone at CrowdStrike desired to ground airlines and disrupt emergency systems. No one will prevent incidents like this by finding scapegoats.
Hey, why not just ask Dave Plummer, former Windows developer...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wAzEJxOo1ts
When anywhere from 8.5 million to over a billion systems went down, numbers I've read so far vary significantly, still that's way too much failure for a simple borked update to a kernel level driver, not even made by Microsoft.
that's a huge sign that their rollout process is garbage
That means spending time and money on developing such a system, which means increasing costs in the short term.. which is kryptonite for current-day CEOs
Right. More than money, I say it's about incentives. You might change the entire C-suite, management, and engineering teams, but if the incentives remain the same (e.g. developers are evaluated by number of commits), the new staff is bound to make the same mistakes.
I strongly believe in no-blame mindsets, but "blame" is not the same as "consequences" and lack of consequences is definitely the biggest driver of corporate apathy. Every incident should trigger a review of systemic and process failures, but in my experience corporate leadership either sucks at this, does not care, or will bury suggestions that involve spending man-hours on a complex solution if the problem lies in that "low likelihood, big impact" corner.
Because likely when the problem happens (again) they'll be able to sweep it under the rug (again) or will have moved on to greener pastures.
What the author of the article suggests is actually a potential fix; if developers (in a broad sense of the word and including POs and such) were accountable (both responsible and empowered) then they would have the power to say No to shortsighted management decisions (and/or deflect the blame in a way that would actually stick to whoever went against an engineer's recommendation).
Edit: see my response, realised the comment was about engineering accountability which I 100% agree with, leaving my original post untouched aside from a typo that's annoying me.
I respectfully disagree coming from a reliability POV, you won't address culture or processes that enable a person to make a mistake. With the exception of malice or negligence, no one does something like this in a vacuum; insufficient or incorrect training, unreasonable pressure, poorly designed processes, a culture that enables actions that lead to failure.
Example I recall from when I worked manufacturing, operator runs a piece of equipment that joins pieces together in manual rather than automatic, failed to return it to a ready flag and caused a line stop. Yeah, operator did something outside of process and caused an issue, clear cut right? Send them home? That was a symptom, not a cause, the operator ran in manual because the auto cycle time was borderline causing linestops, especially on the material being run. The operator was also using manual as there were some location sensors that had issues with that material and there was incoming quality issues, so running manually, while not standard procedure, was a work around to handle processing issues, we also found that culturally, a lot of the operators did not trust the auto cycles and would often override. The operator was unlucky, if we just put all the "accountability" on them we'd never have started projects to improve reliability at that location and change the automation to flick over that flag the operator forgot about if conditions were met regardless.
Accountability is important, but it needs to be applied where appropriate, if someone is being negligent or malicious, yeah there's consequences, but it's limiting to focus on that only. You can implement what you suggest that the devs get accountability for any failure so they're "empowered", but if your culture doesn't enable them to say no or make them feel comfortable to do so, you're not doing anything that will actually prevent an issue in the future.
Besides, I'd almost consider it a PPE control and those are on the bottom of the controls hierarchy with administrative just above it, yes I'm applying oh&s to software because risk is risk conceptually, automated tests, multi phase approvals etc. All of those are better controls than relying on a single developer saying no.
Oh I was talking in the context of my specialty, software engineering. The main difference between an engineer and an operator is that one designs processes while the other executes on those processes. Negligence/malice aside the operator is never to blame.
If the dev is "the guy who presses the 'go live' button" then he's an operator. But what is generally being discussed is all the engineering (or lack thereof) around that "go live" button.
As a software engineer I get queasy when it is conceivable that a noncritical component reaches production without the build artifact being thoroughly tested (with CI tests AND real usage in lower environments).
The fact that CrowdWorks even had a button that could push a DOA update on such a highly critical component points to their processes being so out of the industry standards that no software engineer would have signed off on anything... If software engineers actually had the same accountability as Civil Engineers. If a bridge gets built outside the specifications of the Civil Engineer who signed off on the plans, and that bridge crumbles, someone is getting their tits sued off. Yet there is no equivalent accountability in Software Engineering (except perhaps in super safety-critical stuff like automotive/medical/aerospace/defense applications, and even there I think we'd be surprised).
I realised you meant this over lunch, I'm a mech eng who changed disciplines into software (data and systems mainly) over my career, I 100% feel you, I have seen enough colleagues do things that wouldn't fly in other disciplines, it's definitely put me off a number of times. I'm personally for rubber stamping by a PEng and the responsibility that comes with that. There's enough regulatory and ethical considerations just in data usage that warrants an engineering review, systems designed for compliance should be stamped too.
Really bothers me sometimes how wildwest things are.
This might help in some regard, but this will also create a bottleneck of highly skilled highly expensive Engineers with the accountability certificate. I've seen what happens when this is cornerstone even without the accountability that would make everything even more expensive: the company wants to cut expenses so there's only one high level engineer per five or so projects. Said engineer has no time and no resources to dig into what the fuck actually happens on the projects. Changes are either under reviewed or never released because they are forever stuck in review.
On the other hand, maybe we do move a tad bit too fast, and some industries could do with a bit of thinking before doing. Not every software company should do that, though. To continue on the bridge analogy, most of software developers are more akin to carpenters even if they think about themselves as of architects of buildings and bridges. If a table fails, nothing good is going to happen, and some damage is likely to occur, but the scale is very different from what happens if a condo fails
But a company that hires carpenters to build a roof will be held liable if that roof collapses on the first snow storm. Plumbers and electricians must be accredited AFAIK, have the final word on what is good enough by their standards, and signing off on shoddy work exposes them to criminal negligence lawsuits.
Some software truly has no stakes (e.g. a free mp3 converter), but even boring office productivity tools can be more critical than my colleagues sometimes seem to think. Sure, we work on boring office productivity tools, but hospitals buy those tools and unreliable software means measurably worse health outcomes for the patients.
Engineers signing off on all software is an extreme end of the spectrum, but there are a whole lot of options between that and the current free-for-all where customers have no way to know if the product they're buying is following industry standard practices, or if the deployment process is "Dave receives a USB from Paula and connects to the FTP using a 15 year-old version of FileZilla and a post-it note with the credentials".
True, there is a spectrum of options, and some will work much better than what we have now. It's just that when I read about holding people accountable I don't quite imagine it's going to be implemented in the optimal way, not in the first hundred years or so
All of this has already been implemented for over a hundred years for other trades. Us software people have generally escaped this conversation, but I think we'll have to have it at some point. It doesn't have to be heavy-handed government regulation; a self-governed trades association may well aim to set the bar for licensing requirements and industry standards. This doesn't make it illegal to write code however you want, but it does set higher quality expectations and slightly lowers the bar for proving negligence on a company's part.
There should be a ISO-whateverthefuck or DIN-thisorother that every developer would know to point to when the software deployment process looks as bad as CrowdStrike's. Instead we're happy to shrug and move on when management doesn't even understand what a CI is or why it should get prioritized. In other trades the follow-up for management would be a CYA email that clearly outlines the risk and standards noncompliance and sets a line in the sand liability-wise. That doesn't sound particularly outlandish to me.
Heck, there are already ISO language standards, and there's ISO Software Lifecycle standards, it's absolutely not a leap to move into standards adhering processes. It's not like there's no desire to do it either, code standards alone, how many times have you had discussions about style guides and coding standards company wide? It makes things more consistent and easier for different developers to maintain.
Semi related, I see a lot of non-iso standard SQL that's a pain if you do migrations or refactors, often even just sucks to read through (old school oracle joins look really strange and aren't clear compared to iso standard joins). I really wish people would adhere to the standards as much as possible.
If you were a developer that knew you were responsible for developing ring zero code, massively deployed across corporate systems across the world, then you should goddamned properly test the update before deploying it.
This isn't a simple glitch like a calculation rounding error or some shit, the programmers of any ring zero code should be held fully responsible, for not properly reviewing and testing the code before deploying an update.
Edit: Why not just ask Dave Plummer, former Windows developer...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wAzEJxOo1ts
If you system depends on a human never making a mistake, your system is shit.
It's not by chance that for example, Accountants have since forever had something which they call reconciliation where the transaction data entered from invoices and the like then gets cross-checked with something else done differently, for example bank account transactions - their system is designed with the expectation that humans make mistakes hence there's a cross-check process to catch those.
Clearly Crowdstrike did not have a secondary part of the process designed to validate what's produced by the primary (in software development that would usually be Integration Testing), so their process was shit.
Blaming the human that made a mistake for essentially being human and hence making mistakes, rather than the process around him or her not having been designed to catch human failure and stop it from having nasty consequences, is the kind of simplistic ignorant "logic" that only somebody who has never worked in making anything that has to be reliable could have.
My bet, from decades of working in the industry, is that some higher up in Crowdstrike didn't want to pay for the manpower needed for the secondary process checking the primary one before pushing stuff out to production because "it's never needed" and then the one time it was needed, it wasn't there, thinks really blew up massivelly, and here we are today.
Indeed, I fully agree. They obviously neglected on testing before deployment. So you can split the blame between the developer that goofed on the null pointer dereferencing and the blank null file, and the higher ups that apparently decided that proper testing before deployment wasn't necessary.
Ultimately, it still boils down to human error.
Finding people to blame is, more often than not, useless.
Systematic changes to the process might prevent it from happening again.
Replacing "guilty" people with other fallible humans won't do it.
Still, with billions of dollars in losses across the globe and all the various impacts it's having on people's lives, is nobody gonna be held accountable? Will they just end up charging CrowdStrike as a whole a measly little fine compared to the massive losses the event caused?
One of their developers goofed up pretty bad, but in a fairly simple and forgivable way. The real blame should go on the higher ups that decided that full proper testing wasn't necessary before deployment.
So yes, they really need to review their policies and procedures before pressing that deploy button.
Likely someone will, but legal battles between companies are more about who has more money and leverage than actual accountability, so I don't see them as particularly useful for preventing incidents or for society.
The only good thing that might come out of this and is external to CrowdStrike, is regulation.
But the real question we should be asking ourselves is "how much did tops saved over the course of the years without proper testing"
It probably is what they are concerned about, and I really wish I knew the answer to this question.
I think, this is absolutely not the way to do business, but maybe that's because I don't have one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Making a mistake once in a while on something one does all time is to be expected - even somebody with a 0.1% rate of mistakes will fuck up once in while if they do something with high enough frequency, especially if they're too time constrained to validate.
Making a mistake on something you do just once, such as setting up the process for pushing virus definition files to millions of computers in such a way that they're not checked inhouse before they go into Production, is a 100% rate of mistakes.
A rate of mistakes of 0.1% is generally not incompetence (dependes on how simple the process is and how much you're paying for that person's work), whilst a rate of 100% definitelly is.
The point being that those designing processes, who have lots of time to do it, check it and cross check it, and who generally only do it once per place they work (maybe twice), really have no excuse to fail the one thing they had to do with all the time in the World, whilst those who do the same thing again and again under strict time constraints definitelly have valid excuse to once in a blue moon make a mistake.
Watch the video that I linked as an edit from Dave Plummer, he explains it rather well. The driver was signed, it was the rolling update definition files from CrowdStrike that were unsigned.