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And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategi

And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategize" or "read the room". Obviously this guy is probably writing about a Javascript photo-sharing app or something and it doesn't actually matter, but it's the same principle. The managers who went ahead here would have gone ahead with launching the shuttle for the same reason.

blitz_skull 4y ago
I think your comment actually supports the original comment. If what's at stake is a $60M javascript photo-sharing app, then you gotta decide how much you care to massage egos and play the game. If you're literally putting human lives at risk and you think there's a real chance of death, what a petty thing to say, "Oh well they should've just listened! It's a high-stakes game!" Do be clear, this doesn't shift the responsibility but it just reinforces that if you want to just raise a stink—do it however you think best. If you want to communicate effectively, you must play by the laws of human ego. Plain and simple. People always underestimate the allure of human ego and pride.
- peteradio 4y ago
  What a horrible truth, hate to upvote but you may be right. But why is it engineers who must rise to the political occasion?
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    Everyone should rise to the political occasion. Why is that the engineers should not rise? Politics is how we solve problems without resorting to fists.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      Engineering is the engineers domain. If engineers are expected to puppet master the managers then what is the point of the manager?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - thefaux 4y ago
        > what is the point of the manager? exactly
      - _carbyau_ 4y ago
        Once you are a Manager, you are NOT an engineer. If Engineers don't like Managers-with-no-Engineering-background, then Engineers should try to fill the Manager role from their own ranks. Otherwise, what else do you expect will happen? Like a lot of things, you won't win if you are not in the race. Having said that, having an Ex-Engineer as a manager doesn't guarantee anything. You need the right ExEngineer - a person who can manage!
  - jimmaswell 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task STEM people will naturally succeed at this task immediately, while an average person, like a koala unable to understand a leaf is food unless it's put on a tree, can only answer the logic problem if it's phrased in terms of social rules. The STEM people's brains tended to develop in a way that intuitively understands logic in a more abstract way, better able to understand reality, not just monkey hierarchies. So they will be averse to politics because it's boring, frustrating, disingenuous monkey shit flinging. But they're the most qualified, because they're more likely to put truth and fairness above tribal enrichment and games. If engineers more often made the sacrifice to waste their brainpower dive into that swamp, we'd have colonized space and solved hunger etc. by now. But I can't blame them for not wanting to deal with it.
    - WindyLakeReturn 4y ago
      Aren't the images in that wikipedia link misleading? In the original case, you have the following statement: If even, then red. You also have 4 cards, 3, 8, red brown. So two numbers that relate to the if side and two colors that relate to the then side. In the second picture, you have the statement: If drinking alcohol, then >=21. You also have 4 chards. 16, 25, soda, beer. So two numbers that correlate to the then side and 2 drinks that correlate to the if side. But the way they arrange and color code the cards makes people associate the drinks with the colors and the ages with the numbers, which is mixing up the if and then. Granted, this isn't a problem in the text explanation, but could lead to further confusion by someone trying to create associations between drink alcohol status and color when it is really drink alcohol status and even/odd. Unrelated to my the rest of my comment, I found that despite having what I would consider a very logical brain, I did have a much simpler time solving the drinking problem than the original one. I reach a satisfactory conclusion in each, but the drinking one felt more natural and intuitive while the original problem included a pause and double checking my logic. I would like to be tested on social rules that aren't part of my current social context to see if that played a roll in this specific instance (the article says there is evidence that the effect persists even when the rules aren't part of the existing culture, but that is a general trend and may not apply to specific instances).
    - 4y ago
  - blitz_skull 4y ago
    I'd argue anyone who wants to be successful, in any arena, must rise to these occasions. I'd also argue they're less political and more empathetic opportunities. Most of us are really just 13 year olds emotionally, running around in 20+ year old bodies. All our insecurities and hurts are still there. The art of being able to address the mistake and the inner human who is just longing for love, simultaneously, without crippling either, is terrifyingly difficult.
- SomeCallMeTim 4y ago
  The original comment says "a 12 month delay isn't a solution, it's a problem." But sometimes there is no solution other than recognizing that it will take longer. Or at least not with the current team. And yes, that means telling everyone involved up to and including the CEO if necessary. The only other "solution" was clearly to quit, which they did. A $60M project with 200 people on it isn't going to be able to pivot to creating that photo-sharing app (or whatever) 12 months faster. It's unethical of the entire management team to not immediately go to the client and tell them that the project is seriously behind expectations, in fact, "career limiting move" or not. This is why outsourcing gets such a bad name. It's frequently run by unethical scammers who are just there to milk money out of clients.
Mathnerd314 4y ago
I assume you're referring to Feynmann's remarks in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report. The issue there was that management advertised a safety factor of 1 in 10^5 failures while the engineers thought it was more like 10^2, so numbers were fudged across the board to look reasonable. It really was a communication issue in that there was not accurate information on the riskiest parts of the launch. I guess you could argue here they are dealing with fudged time estimates. OP, like Feynmann, did his own investigation and obtained presumably accurate information. The Rogers report resulted in a new "NASA Safety Office"; OP's investigation was the perfect opportunity to launch his own team but he blew it.
- Jensson 4y ago
  The managers tries to be nice and make the numbers look a bit better to make the next level of management happy. That is the main problem here, putting engineers who just give you the facts straight up without considering what their managers would feel about it in every part of the chain would solve the problem.
  - Mathnerd314 4y ago
    No, according to the Gervais principle engineers are losers who don't know how to run a company. An organization run by engineers would waste their time on unprofitable but technically interesting distractions. The closest economically viable structure is a sociopath plus a small amount of losers, i.e. a startup. But startups don't get $60M contracts until they've grown enough to acquire some middle management.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  > OP's investigation was the perfect opportunity to launch his own team but he blew it. Deliver nicer and more palatable results and you could have had your own team! Jeez, reading the comments here makes a lot of the dysfunction I've observed in industry make sense.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Crap like this is why people like those managers are able to get away with what they did. The challenger blew up because the engineer in the room kept vetoing due to the cold temperatures and he was pressured to stop vetoing, which he did. Feynmans point about the safety factor was a side-point about the general attitude that allowed them to feel safe to put politics in front of nature. This is WHY he made his infamous quote. > For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled The safety factor is what they were claiming to the public and what they used to convince a teacher it was safe, but has absolutely nothing to do with why the challenger disaster happened.
bumby 4y ago
I don't think its the same. In the article, risk was known. "It would be career limiting." The managers knew the risk was to themselves because they weren't offering up a solution. The Challenger was different. There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. That was the main problem; there was an absence of known risk because the operational parameters were outside the testing scope. It was more like "We don't know what the risk is, if there is one." That's a very different animal because you're dealing with uncertainty and low probability events. Those risks tend to show up in hindsight. (same with Columbia for that matter).
- yarg 4y ago
  > There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. I commented on this the other day; there's a useful NPR article on the subject. > The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them. > That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...
  - bumby 4y ago
    I’m familiar with the story, and actually came across your comment a few days ago. He didn’t feel right about it, but that’s not the same as hard data. They didn’t actually have data on the performance of the material at those temperatures, which is part of the big discussion with his managers. He essentially said, “we don’t know how it will act in those conditions.” Granted, on a safety critical system, having no data should be a scenario very, very carefully considered as a harbinger of doubt, but having no data isn’t the same as having a concrete understanding of the risk. The problem with large, complex systems is you will always find someone who thinks management isn’t taking a certain risk seriously. I know aerospace engineers who squawk about the risk being too great, yet that’s a 5 sigma industry. NASA reliability risk is usually quite rigorously defined. If he had hard data that said the risk was outside the acceptable envelope, it would have been relatively easy for the managers to stand behind him (especially when weather is driving that risk). Columbia was similar. They had lots of data points that the foam shedding wasn’t a problem is different scenarios, but they didn’t have the same evidence about that specific scenario (the deltaV, flight profile, and where it struck).

blitz_skull 4y ago

I think your comment actually supports the original comment. If what's at stake is a $60M javascript photo-sharing app, then you gotta decide how much you care to massage egos and play the game. If you're literally putting human lives at risk and you think there's a real chance of death, what a petty thing to say, "Oh well they should've just listened! It's a high-stakes game!" Do be clear, this doesn't shift the responsibility but it just reinforces that if you want to just raise a stink—do it however you think best. If you want to communicate effectively, you must play by the laws of human ego. Plain and simple. People always underestimate the allure of human ego and pride.

peteradio 4y ago
What a horrible truth, hate to upvote but you may be right. But why is it engineers who must rise to the political occasion?
- vaidhy 4y ago
  Everyone should rise to the political occasion. Why is that the engineers should not rise? Politics is how we solve problems without resorting to fists.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Engineering is the engineers domain. If engineers are expected to puppet master the managers then what is the point of the manager?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - thefaux 4y ago
      > what is the point of the manager? exactly
    - _carbyau_ 4y ago
      Once you are a Manager, you are NOT an engineer. If Engineers don't like Managers-with-no-Engineering-background, then Engineers should try to fill the Manager role from their own ranks. Otherwise, what else do you expect will happen? Like a lot of things, you won't win if you are not in the race. Having said that, having an Ex-Engineer as a manager doesn't guarantee anything. You need the right ExEngineer - a person who can manage!
- jimmaswell 4y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task STEM people will naturally succeed at this task immediately, while an average person, like a koala unable to understand a leaf is food unless it's put on a tree, can only answer the logic problem if it's phrased in terms of social rules. The STEM people's brains tended to develop in a way that intuitively understands logic in a more abstract way, better able to understand reality, not just monkey hierarchies. So they will be averse to politics because it's boring, frustrating, disingenuous monkey shit flinging. But they're the most qualified, because they're more likely to put truth and fairness above tribal enrichment and games. If engineers more often made the sacrifice to waste their brainpower dive into that swamp, we'd have colonized space and solved hunger etc. by now. But I can't blame them for not wanting to deal with it.
  - WindyLakeReturn 4y ago
    Aren't the images in that wikipedia link misleading? In the original case, you have the following statement: If even, then red. You also have 4 cards, 3, 8, red brown. So two numbers that relate to the if side and two colors that relate to the then side. In the second picture, you have the statement: If drinking alcohol, then >=21. You also have 4 chards. 16, 25, soda, beer. So two numbers that correlate to the then side and 2 drinks that correlate to the if side. But the way they arrange and color code the cards makes people associate the drinks with the colors and the ages with the numbers, which is mixing up the if and then. Granted, this isn't a problem in the text explanation, but could lead to further confusion by someone trying to create associations between drink alcohol status and color when it is really drink alcohol status and even/odd. Unrelated to my the rest of my comment, I found that despite having what I would consider a very logical brain, I did have a much simpler time solving the drinking problem than the original one. I reach a satisfactory conclusion in each, but the drinking one felt more natural and intuitive while the original problem included a pause and double checking my logic. I would like to be tested on social rules that aren't part of my current social context to see if that played a roll in this specific instance (the article says there is evidence that the effect persists even when the rules aren't part of the existing culture, but that is a general trend and may not apply to specific instances).
  - 4y ago
- blitz_skull 4y ago
  I'd argue anyone who wants to be successful, in any arena, must rise to these occasions. I'd also argue they're less political and more empathetic opportunities. Most of us are really just 13 year olds emotionally, running around in 20+ year old bodies. All our insecurities and hurts are still there. The art of being able to address the mistake and the inner human who is just longing for love, simultaneously, without crippling either, is terrifyingly difficult.
SomeCallMeTim 4y ago
The original comment says "a 12 month delay isn't a solution, it's a problem." But sometimes there is no solution other than recognizing that it will take longer. Or at least not with the current team. And yes, that means telling everyone involved up to and including the CEO if necessary. The only other "solution" was clearly to quit, which they did. A $60M project with 200 people on it isn't going to be able to pivot to creating that photo-sharing app (or whatever) 12 months faster. It's unethical of the entire management team to not immediately go to the client and tell them that the project is seriously behind expectations, in fact, "career limiting move" or not. This is why outsourcing gets such a bad name. It's frequently run by unethical scammers who are just there to milk money out of clients.

Mathnerd314 4y ago

I assume you're referring to Feynmann's remarks in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report. The issue there was that management advertised a safety factor of 1 in 10^5 failures while the engineers thought it was more like 10^2, so numbers were fudged across the board to look reasonable. It really was a communication issue in that there was not accurate information on the riskiest parts of the launch. I guess you could argue here they are dealing with fudged time estimates. OP, like Feynmann, did his own investigation and obtained presumably accurate information. The Rogers report resulted in a new "NASA Safety Office"; OP's investigation was the perfect opportunity to launch his own team but he blew it.

Jensson 4y ago
The managers tries to be nice and make the numbers look a bit better to make the next level of management happy. That is the main problem here, putting engineers who just give you the facts straight up without considering what their managers would feel about it in every part of the chain would solve the problem.
- Mathnerd314 4y ago
  No, according to the Gervais principle engineers are losers who don't know how to run a company. An organization run by engineers would waste their time on unprofitable but technically interesting distractions. The closest economically viable structure is a sociopath plus a small amount of losers, i.e. a startup. But startups don't get $60M contracts until they've grown enough to acquire some middle management.
whimsicalism 4y ago
> OP's investigation was the perfect opportunity to launch his own team but he blew it. Deliver nicer and more palatable results and you could have had your own team! Jeez, reading the comments here makes a lot of the dysfunction I've observed in industry make sense.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
Crap like this is why people like those managers are able to get away with what they did. The challenger blew up because the engineer in the room kept vetoing due to the cold temperatures and he was pressured to stop vetoing, which he did. Feynmans point about the safety factor was a side-point about the general attitude that allowed them to feel safe to put politics in front of nature. This is WHY he made his infamous quote. > For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled The safety factor is what they were claiming to the public and what they used to convince a teacher it was safe, but has absolutely nothing to do with why the challenger disaster happened.

bumby 4y ago

I don't think its the same. In the article, risk was known. "It would be career limiting." The managers knew the risk was to themselves because they weren't offering up a solution. The Challenger was different. There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. That was the main problem; there was an absence of known risk because the operational parameters were outside the testing scope. It was more like "We don't know what the risk is, if there is one." That's a very different animal because you're dealing with uncertainty and low probability events. Those risks tend to show up in hindsight. (same with Columbia for that matter).

yarg 4y ago
> There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. I commented on this the other day; there's a useful NPR article on the subject. > The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them. > That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...
- bumby 4y ago
  I’m familiar with the story, and actually came across your comment a few days ago. He didn’t feel right about it, but that’s not the same as hard data. They didn’t actually have data on the performance of the material at those temperatures, which is part of the big discussion with his managers. He essentially said, “we don’t know how it will act in those conditions.” Granted, on a safety critical system, having no data should be a scenario very, very carefully considered as a harbinger of doubt, but having no data isn’t the same as having a concrete understanding of the risk. The problem with large, complex systems is you will always find someone who thinks management isn’t taking a certain risk seriously. I know aerospace engineers who squawk about the risk being too great, yet that’s a 5 sigma industry. NASA reliability risk is usually quite rigorously defined. If he had hard data that said the risk was outside the acceptable envelope, it would have been relatively easy for the managers to stand behind him (especially when weather is driving that risk). Columbia was similar. They had lots of data points that the foam shedding wasn’t a problem is different scenarios, but they didn’t have the same evidence about that specific scenario (the deltaV, flight profile, and where it struck).