Comparison
Boiling frogvsNormalisation of deviance
Boiling frog
the build took forty seconds two years ago and takes eleven minutes now, and nobody remembers a day it got slower.
A degradation that arrives so gradually that it is never noticed as a change. Build times, page counts, alert noise, review latency and on-call load all drift this way, and each individual increment is too small to raise. The counter is measurement over time rather than judgement in the moment: a number on a chart notices what people acclimatise to.
Full entry →Normalisation of deviance
the deploy has warned about that for months and everyone knows to ignore it.
The process by which an unsafe practice becomes normal because it has not yet caused harm. Each individual acceptance is rational — it worked last time — and the standard drifts until the anomaly is invisible to the people inside it. It is the mechanism behind most large organisational failures, and the practical countermeasure is periodic outside eyes plus taking small deviations seriously while they are still small.
Full entry →