Posts

Showing posts from 2018
Image
Cognitive Bias in On-Call: the evidence On August 27th 2017, I tweeted a link to what I described as a " survey about attitudes etc to oncall/risk ". I urged SWEs/SREs to take it and asserted it should take < 5m to complete. As later revealed , this was somewhat of a white lie: it was a survey, and it did indeed have time-limited questions which meant it plausibly take only a small number of minutes, but there was a lot more going on than any single test-taker could discern. In fact, it was a cognitive bias detector -- a survey designed to gather evidence to confirm or reject the hypothesis that cognitive bias of various kinds might operate in on-call related situations, or in SRE thinking generally. In the construction of this survey, I was strongly inspired by Kahneman & Tversky's work about cognitive bias in general, as related in the wonderful Thinking, Fast and Slow , which I strongly recommend everyone to read. Specifically, the survey looked at part