4 ms·

But if you buy something for a lot of money, and then you figure it out you paid way too much you don't typically walk around bragging about it.

• jayjay71 10y ago
  Owning up to mistakes is the fastest way to make progress. Waiting so long to admit that a project failed worries me. X is supposed to be a moonshot factory, where failures are celebrated and reality dictates that the majority of their undertakings will fail. To me, the delay is indicative of a culture more concerned with appearances than substance. Maybe X had good reasons for staying quiet for so long, but unless they say why it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.
  • sangnoir 10y ago
    > Owning up to mistakes is the fastest way to make progress. Pretending they never happened is indicative of an opaque culture that is more concerned with appearances than substance. What makes you think this didn't happen internally?
    • jayjay71 10y ago
      I don't know what happened internally. But if that happened internally and they weren't willing to announce it externally, that shows they are concerned with appearances. And if that didn't happen internally then they have a cultural issue where they are afraid to embrace failure and learn from it. Obviously I have limited information and I am not trying to define X based on this one event. But I do think it says something about the culture there.
      • ZeroFries 10y ago
        Every company is concerned with appearance. It's how they're judged.
        • jayjay71 10y ago
          A large part of why the original Skunk Works was so successful is because Kelly Johnson, and later Ben Rich, did not care about outward appearances. They had a job and they did it (and they made it profitable). Here's a great book on the subject. https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/dp/0316743003 https://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir-Lockheed/...
          • asynchronous13 10y ago
            Can you point to any press release that the secret skunk works facility published within a year of a failure? I don't recall any.
            • Butts1234 10y ago
              They did the closest thing they could - when a project failed, they killed it and refunded money to the government. In the defense industry, this is pretty rare (the F35 project is widely criticized as a failure by almost everybody that's ever used it but it's still going to get hundreds of billions of dollars in future funding). They could have said nothing, pretended everything was fine, and continued to siphon money from their customers but they decided to cut their losses early and maintain their reputation as an organization that gets things done on time and under budget. This got them a lot more contracts moving forward.
              • asynchronous13 10y ago
                First, skunk works never refunded money to the government. There is at least one anecdote that they tried but the government accounting office had no way to receive the money back. jayjay's initial comment was that the lack of PR was concerning, but then brings up a super secret facility that had no PR whatsoever as a counter example. The comparison just doesn't make sense. But let's say that your claim is true, that skunk works communicated with their customer on a failed project. That still has no relation to a public announcement about a failed project. This was a self-funded project by Google, they are their own customer. The lack of PR about internal projects says nothing about their internal culture.