Luck in Technology

Luck is a thing: one person will have no complaints about NFS, while others too many. Some of this might be lack of experience. Maybe the positive on NFS person has always used that one storage device that has always worked with their devices. Others have not been so lucky, and will actively work to remove NFS before it becomes a grand source of uncompensated overtime hours. Assuming you can get NFS working, especially across different operating systems or maybe there's a cheap network switch with an "improve network security" setting that breaks NFS. Given my experiences, I assume anyone with a positive view of NFS is lucky.

Larry Niven touches on luck in "Ringworld" (1970). But that was a engineered story where most everything happened just so. The luck was somewhere else.

You may not want to push your luck; old devices may be more prone to errors and therefore perhaps total key compromise. Whoops?

Passive SSH Key Compromise via Lattices

On the other hand, system administrators may very well suffer from a reverse survivorship bias where long exposure to repeatedly broken things paints a more dire picture of reality than is actual. One almost never hears from users without problems, or folks on a support channel without complaints. Sysadmins also like to share horror stories with their peers so that they too may be wary of the pitfalls of this or that technology. This too is a source of bias.

Some have claimed that one can become a, say, distinguished engineer through hard work. This is probably necessary, but not sufficient. There may be some luck involved. In particular one can work away in nowheresville and never gain attention, while someone else might have a lucky contact or encounter that lines them up with a good promotion path in a favorable environment. There are things one might do, in addition to hard work, to enhance the chances of luck getting involved, but that's outside the sphere of hard work. It may involve shooting the breeze at a hallway talk in a conference or even a random encounter in a store if you wear a particularly geeky t-shirt and then get to talking.