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As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government compete
by jandrese 6y ago
As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories.
The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project.
That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.
- nullserver 6y agoMy dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work. Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.
- banana_giraffe 6y agoIt's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
- mywittyname 6y agoIt makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation. It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.
- mavhc 6y agoMakes sense in the short term, but not the long term, as the entire article makes clear
- MattGaiser 6y agoI would be very interested in reading case studies where a company both does documentation well and does not get bogged down in vast amounts of paperwork. As yes, plenty of fixes for things are not written down anywhere.
- jaxx75 6y agoIf you haven't read it, you'd probably enjoy (and anyone interested in process) The Toyota Way by Liker.
- MattGaiser 6y agoThanks!
- s1artibartfast 6y agoUnfortunately, every company that I have been at that has tried to implant the Toyota Way just bolted additional processes onto their legacy ones, adding complexity.
- nullserver 6y agoReproducibility. Have others come in and follow the directions.
- nullserver 6y agoFrom the conversation, admittedly 20 years ago. Not documenting was highly intentional, and why I was being informed.
- dkarl 6y agoI've seen that way too many times. "Why doesn't this link in the internal console work?" "Oh, after you click it and get the error, you have to remove the trailing dash character and refresh." "Weird, I wonder how this slipped by Jared in QA when he tested it. We better let him know." "Don't bother, Jared is the one who showed me how to remove the dash...."
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoIt is genuinely impossible to document every lityle nuance that makes everything work. Every time i am dealing in new hires, i realise how much we just take for granted
- ecpottinger 6y agoNo, the problem is that while you are writing documentation you are not making money for the company. I remember when I and Dave as the senior tech told our boss that we should put the most common repairs into a database so new hires would not have to ask us questions all the time. He asked how long the job would take, and we answered about a week for all the common stuff. And his answer was, "That is a week you will not be making the company any money.". We tried to explain the long term savings, but he was not interested.
- dkarl 6y agoI think the best way to think of this part of a wiki is as a cache for everybody's help. No need to pre-populate the cache, just start using it, and the most frequently used information will tend to be there.
- nurgasemetey 6y agoDefinitely, not perfect readme or documentation but at least that covers 70% of cases.
- csours 6y agoIt might have been protectionism, but also life is just complicated. Documentation is always incomplete and much of it is out of date as soon as you write it down. Humans have so many cognitive biases, we don't even notice half the things we do. Many scientific studies cannot be replicated either due to errors or ambiguous steps. You only have what you test. If you want working documentation, you have to do a blind test. That can be pretty dang expensive, and most people don't think that way. Running production is heavily motivated to just keep running, and not worry too much about all of the potential problems - there are just too many potential problems.
- pjc50 6y agoConversely, a lot of management have zero interest in knowing this kind of detail. It may not be possible to get the info fed back. People may be punished for not following the process, even if it's impossible to get the job done by following it exactly ( this is a very common dysfunction!)
- jessaustin 6y agoYeah this sort of "why didn't the lowest-paid employee do more work without permission so her boss's boss's boss wouldn't have to think too hard" suggestion surprises me a lot more often than it should surprise me. Sure, it would benefit shareholders, but companies are run by executives.
- hinkley 6y agoThe return of guilds.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago> Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech. https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech
- goatinaboat 6y agoPart of it may have been job protection. Management gets exactly the behaviours from employees that it rewards and incentivises.
- hcrisp 6y agoApparently that is a Russian proverb: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
- geomark 6y agoAs some siblings have commented, it's probably the failure to get back and document it. But the desire for job protection is not uncommon. I saw it when I worked on testing satellite power converters at a large aerospace company. There were procedures and paperwork for everything, but the test procedure for one series of power converters did not work. Only one technician knew how to actually test them. He led me through it, and he had plenty of time to update the procedures, but refused to do it. It was gross and obvious what he was doing, but somehow he was allowed to get away with it. There was no union.
- HenryKissinger 6y agoSo many problems could be solved by giving every adult $1,000,000 in a one-time, tax-free, no strings attached, lump sum. The technician refused to document the procedure because he was afraid of becoming replaceable. He was afraid of becoming replaceable because he was afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of losing his job because he would lose his sole source of income. Let's just give people free money already.
- ecpottinger 6y agoSorry, very often it is ego. Even is the job is secure, the worker thinks he is special because s/he knows something the others do not.
- geomark 6y agoI'm pretty sure this is sarcasm. But I never know these days because a lot of people actually avocate things like this. After seeing what happens to most people after they receive a lot of free stuff, especially large sums of money, I would never advocate something like this. There's also the rather obvious issue about how it would be paid for but, again, there a lots of people who think you can just print money out of thin air forever and nothing will ever happen.
- dylan604 6y ago>As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. No, but we'll totally sponsor/fund research into things like mind control and astral projection. Funding something totally useful like reverse engineering skills is totally anathema. Just really sad commentary
- Jtsummers 6y ago> No, but we'll totally sponsor/fund research into things like mind control and astral projection. Funding something totally useful like reverse engineering skills is totally anathema. Just really sad commentary I don't get your point. The government does invest in reverse engineering, and much more than they invest into mind control and astral projection. It's nonsense to say that investing in useful skills is "totally anathema". What GP was saying was not that they don't invest in reverse engineering, but they wouldn't try to backdoor it or secret the experience into the industry with some project like this. They wouldn't try to "trick" the industry into developing the experience by putting out smaller contracts like this. They do invest in it, but directly. That one program office has put out a contract for reverse engineering of one system does not mean that the general capability is ignored, within the government or the industry.
- goatcode 6y ago>This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories And, possibly, before the 1960s.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoEmployees are either clock punchers or workers. Small departments in poor cities occasionally wind up highly competent because they wind up staffed with a high enough ratio of workers to get things done and everybody above them has bigger problems than micro managing so they have the freedom to get things done. And it runs for awhile then comes under scrutiny and gets made back into junk because politics.
- goatcode 6y ago> politics I agree. And there's a massive depth unwinding to that.
- ericmay 6y agoWhy does it seem to be that we always assume that our own government is incompetent and unable of forward thinking, but all other governments (China, etc.) are?
- jandrese 6y agoPeople assuming the worst mostly. US intelligence used to always overestimate Soviet capabilities too. Usually by a large margin. It’s a bit terrifying when you realize that the people at the top don’t know what they are doing either. Much of the world runs on guesswork and inertia. This is also true of most companies.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago"It’s a bit terrifying when you realize that the people at the top don’t know what they are doing either. Much of the world runs on guesswork and inertia." In my early 20's this 'discovery' shocked me
- csunbird 6y agoYeah, as an adult in late twenties, I am realizing this fact as well. Nobody has any idea on what they are doing, world is in chaos.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoBecause we can't see what's going on inside the Chinese government so they get benefit of the doubt. In contrast we know exactly how the local sausage is made.
- brokenmachine 6y agoChina doesn't have to deal with a lot of the "complications" that the Western governments have to deal with, like human rights, etc. This gives those in power the potential to achieve their goals more efficiently. Not saying this is how it actually ends up, but they certainly are prepared to use a lot of leverage tools that are not available to more free countries.
- tobylane 6y agoIt sounds like it could be they have the original blueprints of the first ordered plane but by the time you received the 100th they were different and then it’s had overhauls and other modifications since. About as useful as a ten year old X-ray for a 25 year old.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable. The air force is currently going on an in-housing and "agile all the things" binge because they're sick of 30yr of getting screwed by contractors. My money is on Northrop giving them a sky high but not without precedent price and someone saying "screw it, this is the perfect thing to learn how to do"