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Yet there's no shortage of foreign talent. A friend works for a major engineering firm in the US. At one point his office had thirty engineers and technicians.

Yet there's no shortage of foreign talent. A friend works for a major engineering firm in the US. At one point his office had thirty engineers and technicians. They came from thirty different countries and none were American. The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level.

mncharity 7y ago
> The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level. There was a recent thread, about a paid talk at blackhat, by a scam company, and the audience's pushback. It included a thought, something like, that there are communities of professionalism, and communities of "bs", and they are intertwined interestingly in companies and society. I fuzzily recall reading years ago, a comparison of subway construction management and cost in various countries. One city that worked well, had the professional expertise to manage the project within the government, able and willing to discipline contractors, and a city culture that this was an area for professionalism, not a playpen for political graft and grandstanding. Cultures have norms of "this you just don't do". A recurring example is espionage during the cold war. You might kill someone. You can certainly seduce their wife. But you don't otherwise mess with their kids. I've seen some pretty intense loathing of political subculture, from people in scientific subculture, based on conflicts in such norms (around climate change, and "this is useless research" stories). Boeing's root failure is said to have been an engineering-centered culture being displaced by another. So I'd like to see work on how subcultures negotiate and accept boundaries of influence. We frequently discuss examples: the sales team that sells software that doesn't exist, and looks to engineering to magically manifest it. And we name local phenomena, like moral hazard. But I've not seen a vocabulary and theory for discussing such at a larger scale, as instances of larger patterns. Which makes it harder to explore what boundaries might enable less dysfunctional execution of large projects. Perhaps that's one way to explore "dysfunction [...] at a higher level"?
- selestify 7y ago
  Do you remember which talk that was?
  - mncharity 7y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666060
- ativzzz 7y ago
  I think this makes a lot of sense in large organizations, particularly because these different units you speak of are not incentivized to work together, but to compete with each other. They fight each other for the budget so their leaders can advance their careers instead of working together to make the company more efficient overall.

mncharity 7y ago

> The dysfunction seems to be at a higher level. There was a recent thread, about a paid talk at blackhat, by a scam company, and the audience's pushback. It included a thought, something like, that there are communities of professionalism, and communities of "bs", and they are intertwined interestingly in companies and society. I fuzzily recall reading years ago, a comparison of subway construction management and cost in various countries. One city that worked well, had the professional expertise to manage the project within the government, able and willing to discipline contractors, and a city culture that this was an area for professionalism, not a playpen for political graft and grandstanding. Cultures have norms of "this you just don't do". A recurring example is espionage during the cold war. You might kill someone. You can certainly seduce their wife. But you don't otherwise mess with their kids. I've seen some pretty intense loathing of political subculture, from people in scientific subculture, based on conflicts in such norms (around climate change, and "this is useless research" stories). Boeing's root failure is said to have been an engineering-centered culture being displaced by another. So I'd like to see work on how subcultures negotiate and accept boundaries of influence. We frequently discuss examples: the sales team that sells software that doesn't exist, and looks to engineering to magically manifest it. And we name local phenomena, like moral hazard. But I've not seen a vocabulary and theory for discussing such at a larger scale, as instances of larger patterns. Which makes it harder to explore what boundaries might enable less dysfunctional execution of large projects. Perhaps that's one way to explore "dysfunction [...] at a higher level"?

selestify 7y ago
Do you remember which talk that was?
- mncharity 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666060
ativzzz 7y ago
I think this makes a lot of sense in large organizations, particularly because these different units you speak of are not incentivized to work together, but to compete with each other. They fight each other for the budget so their leaders can advance their careers instead of working together to make the company more efficient overall.