I've seen a few people say of the Microsoft and FAA incidents that it's foolish to seek failure points because these are complex systems and complex systems do not yield to such analysis.While that's often true of complex systems, I think this misses the point, dangerously. We can and frequently do engineer out this kind of complexity. That's what engineering and . The failure in these instances is that this appears not to have been done, or not done adequately.Socio-technological systems have existed for millenia. Yes, things are more complicated now. But that does not justify throwing up our hands and saying "welp, complex systems, no way to know". There are ways to know: you engineer the system such that when something goes wrong there is an analysis to be done that reveals causes. If that analysis is not possible, you're not finished engineering. Deploying a poorly engineered system is a fault traceable to individuals, and they ought to be accountable.We are today awash in systems that have not been engineered properly, software systems especially. Don't let that blind you or lead you to fatalism.#dev #tech #software #engineering #FAA #Microsoft