Why Most People Don’t Follow Best Practices by Kendra Little.
Posted in a MS SQL Server context but the lesson applies to software, systems, and processes alike:
Unfortunately, human nature makes people persist all sorts of bad practices. I find everything in the wild from weekly reboots to crazy settings in Windows and SQL Server that damage performance and can cause outages. When I ask why the settings are in place, I usually hear a story that goes like this:
- Once upon a time, in a land far far away there was a problem
- The people of the land were very unhappy
- A bunch of changes were made
- Some of the changes were recommended by someone on the internet. We think.
- The problem went away
- The people of the land were happier
- We hunkered down and just hoped the problem would never come back
- The people of the land have been growing more and more unhappy over time again
Most of the time “best practices” are implemented to try and avoid pain rather than to configure things well. And most of the time they aren’t thought out in terms of long term performance. Most people haven’t really implemented any best practices, they’ve just reacted to situations.
How are the people of the land near you?