Comment by samatman

> It's never fine.

It kind of is, though.

The idea is that the full algorithm is "automation plus some guy". Automation takes care of 99.9% of it, and some guy handles the 0.01% that's exceptional, falls through the cracks, and so on.

The problem is when you scale from 100,000 events per day to half a trillion, and your fallback is still basically "some guy". At ten failures a day, contacting The Guy means sending an email, and maybe sometimes it takes two. At a million failures a day, your only prayer of reaching The Guy is to get to the top of HN, or write a viral Twitter thread.

There are some things which are important enough that they can't be left up to this formula, and maybe you're thinking of those. I'm not, and I doubt the person you're replying to is either.