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Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. Basically the motivations of most employees seems like, "if I mess up once, I get fired; if I don't produce

Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. Basically the motivations of most employees seems like, "if I mess up once, I get fired; if I don't produce any movement, I can't get fired". Naturally, the output is glacial progress and the introduction of tons of safety-theatre procedures (that get the implementers promotions for "increasing a culture of safety"). We all know this from the subject the FAA regulates: flights. New unleaded gas gets forever to approve. Simple changes to instruments takes years of certification, leaving 1960s technology in place when clear improvements have happened in the last 60 years. I always wondered what would happen if this culture were carried over to another space. We know what it looks like in medicine because the FDA has similar priorities. Rarely do we see it in tech, which is known to "move fast and break stuff". But here we get a glimpse of the dystopian crossover between FAA-procedure-culture and software engineering.

avar 4y ago
We know what it's like in software because we have e.g. the example of how the Space Shuttle's flight control software was developed and audited. It's weeks of meetings, tests and change processes etc. obsessing over changing a single instruction in assembly. Which also suggests to me that the problem isn't per-se the glacial progress & approval processes, but that they're using the wrong glacial processes. If this FAA software was developed with something like the Space Shuttle's process it would still take forever to change something, but at least you'd end up with a function that you could mathematically prove would be able to handle any conceivable input. I think you're never going to convince the government of a "move fast" culture. Even if the overall cost of grounding planes would be less than the cost of more reliability they'd never go for it. Too many people's asses are on the line, and they're not having to spend their own money. The only thing they have to "pay" for is possible loss of face, or loss of political capital, both of which can be insured against effectively for free with taxpayer dollars. But you might just be able to convince them that they're using the wrong sort of bureaucracy. You'd still spend a billion or two on something that should cost a million, but at least you'd get actual reliability as a result.
- metacritic12 4y ago
  I would settle for the government moving bureaucracy from safety-theatre to actual safety.
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- nradov 4y ago
  The NASA Space Shuttle flight software was among the best ever developed. There was never a defect that impacted safety. But that team had kind of an "unfair" advantage in that were able to program in assembly code on bare metal with no real software stack. Whereas the rest of us are forced to build on a foundation of sand using multiple layers of low-quality third-party software in order to deliver any useful functionality.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > But that team had kind of an "unfair" advantage in that were able to program in assembly code on bare metal with no real software stack The Space Shuttle’s avionics software was not written in assembly, rather HAL/S, a high-level language invented for the project. Assembly was mainly used for the custom real-time OS kernel. They also maintained their HAL/S toolchain, which was written in XPL-a PL/I dialect which was popular for compiler development in the 1970s. The development environment ran on IBM mainframes, and the main CPUs on the Shuttles were the aerospace derivatives of the IBM S/360 mainframe architecture, System/4pi, model AP-101. The same CPUs were used by USAF (e.g. the B-1 bomber), but USAF mainly used JOVIAL to program theirs. Another big user of JOVIAL was the FAA, who used it to write a lot of their original mainframe-based air traffic control software (FAA HOST). The Space Shuttle team inventing their own programming language was a byproduct of the time the project started (1970s). If they’d started a decade later, they probably would have used Ada instead. But Ada didn’t exist yet, and they thought inventing their own language was a better choice than JOVIAL
nonethewiser 4y ago
Seems like Space-X is a counterpoint to this type of operation. They are much more efficient and have been rather reliable.
chasd00 4y ago
yeah working for government is strange. I'm in a position where the product owners don't want to make any enhancements/changes to a production system out of budget concerns. However, the actual invoice for my team's time is the same whether they make changes or not. They don't want to "spend the money on enhancements to a functioning system" but the invoice amount is the same every month regardless. oh and in my experience, government fte's can screw up an infinite amount of times with no risk to their job.
greggarious 4y ago
>Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. Basically the motivations of most employees seems like, "if I mess up once, I get fired Weird, my impression was federal employment is the opposite: mess up as much as you want and you’ll be retrained and reassigned. Or a that only in contexts like harassment or drug use?
- metacritic12 4y ago
  You're right, my "mess up once, get fired", I really mean if a flight crashes and the FAA could have done something, they'll get political flak. High level political appointees may need to resign. Whereas if an agency does nothing for a term, the political leaders get to stay. For routine FTEs, as a sibling post mentioned, you can probably mess up in a lot of ways (short of murder or being really non-PC) and still keep your job.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
It sounds less like risk averse and more like cover-your-ass though; go through long checklists and committees and people so that no one person can be held responsible for any problems. The closest thing you'll see in tech will be at back-end software like banks, insurance companies, pension funds, investment companies, embedded engineering / SCADA, ERP systems, etc. The "move fast and break things" mindset seems to mainly be a thing in Silicon Valley internet companies / start-ups, and mainly the latter because they're driven to pump up their own value instead of provide reliable software. Because if Twitter is down, it's an inconvenience, but if airplane software fails, lives are on the line.
tomrod 4y ago
> Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. There is a difference from risk averse ("we require heavy testing before deployment") and dysfunctional ("we are terrified of breaking anything but are unwilling to invest in maintenance"). Take the Air Force. Their risk decision is: can we accomplish a specific mission at hand with ideally minimal loss of warfigher life. If they don't maintain their planes, they cannot achieve the warfighter life loss minimization. Similar with IT generally. Kicking the can down the road just grows the problem.
vikingerik 4y ago
When that risk-adverse culture is carried over to another space, it just fails and never gets noticed. Risk-adverse organizations get outcompeted by more efficient risk-tolerant ones, every time that such competition is possible. Risk aversion only works for an entity that has a forcible monopoly in its space. The FAA and FDA do. Another is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which exhibits the same behavior: their job is to prevent accidents, and the surest way to do that is to never approve anything at all.
Tangurena2 4y ago
The early aviation industry had a very substantial "move fast and break stuff" mentality. YouTube has plenty of videos of those folks. However "break stuff" usually meant smearing aircraft and bodies all over the landscape. Much of FAA's regulation is to try to prevent killing "too many" people. If the engine on your car stops, you can usually pull over to the side of the road. If the engine on your aircraft stops, you're going to be landing soon and hopefully not landing on a building full of people. And if you're really lucky when the engine stops, all the people sitting in the back can walk away. The FAA is frequently called a "tombstone agency" - who only act long after fatal accidents and the bodies have been buried.

avar 4y ago

We know what it's like in software because we have e.g. the example of how the Space Shuttle's flight control software was developed and audited. It's weeks of meetings, tests and change processes etc. obsessing over changing a single instruction in assembly. Which also suggests to me that the problem isn't per-se the glacial progress & approval processes, but that they're using the wrong glacial processes. If this FAA software was developed with something like the Space Shuttle's process it would still take forever to change something, but at least you'd end up with a function that you could mathematically prove would be able to handle any conceivable input. I think you're never going to convince the government of a "move fast" culture. Even if the overall cost of grounding planes would be less than the cost of more reliability they'd never go for it. Too many people's asses are on the line, and they're not having to spend their own money. The only thing they have to "pay" for is possible loss of face, or loss of political capital, both of which can be insured against effectively for free with taxpayer dollars. But you might just be able to convince them that they're using the wrong sort of bureaucracy. You'd still spend a billion or two on something that should cost a million, but at least you'd get actual reliability as a result.

metacritic12 4y ago
I would settle for the government moving bureaucracy from safety-theatre to actual safety.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nradov 4y ago
The NASA Space Shuttle flight software was among the best ever developed. There was never a defect that impacted safety. But that team had kind of an "unfair" advantage in that were able to program in assembly code on bare metal with no real software stack. Whereas the rest of us are forced to build on a foundation of sand using multiple layers of low-quality third-party software in order to deliver any useful functionality.
- skissane 4y ago
  > But that team had kind of an "unfair" advantage in that were able to program in assembly code on bare metal with no real software stack The Space Shuttle’s avionics software was not written in assembly, rather HAL/S, a high-level language invented for the project. Assembly was mainly used for the custom real-time OS kernel. They also maintained their HAL/S toolchain, which was written in XPL-a PL/I dialect which was popular for compiler development in the 1970s. The development environment ran on IBM mainframes, and the main CPUs on the Shuttles were the aerospace derivatives of the IBM S/360 mainframe architecture, System/4pi, model AP-101. The same CPUs were used by USAF (e.g. the B-1 bomber), but USAF mainly used JOVIAL to program theirs. Another big user of JOVIAL was the FAA, who used it to write a lot of their original mainframe-based air traffic control software (FAA HOST). The Space Shuttle team inventing their own programming language was a byproduct of the time the project started (1970s). If they’d started a decade later, they probably would have used Ada instead. But Ada didn’t exist yet, and they thought inventing their own language was a better choice than JOVIAL

nonethewiser 4y ago

Seems like Space-X is a counterpoint to this type of operation. They are much more efficient and have been rather reliable.

chasd00 4y ago

yeah working for government is strange. I'm in a position where the product owners don't want to make any enhancements/changes to a production system out of budget concerns. However, the actual invoice for my team's time is the same whether they make changes or not. They don't want to "spend the money on enhancements to a functioning system" but the invoice amount is the same every month regardless. oh and in my experience, government fte's can screw up an infinite amount of times with no risk to their job.

greggarious 4y ago

>Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. Basically the motivations of most employees seems like, "if I mess up once, I get fired Weird, my impression was federal employment is the opposite: mess up as much as you want and you’ll be retrained and reassigned. Or a that only in contexts like harassment or drug use?

metacritic12 4y ago
You're right, my "mess up once, get fired", I really mean if a flight crashes and the FAA could have done something, they'll get political flak. High level political appointees may need to resign. Whereas if an agency does nothing for a term, the political leaders get to stay. For routine FTEs, as a sibling post mentioned, you can probably mess up in a lot of ways (short of murder or being really non-PC) and still keep your job.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

It sounds less like risk averse and more like cover-your-ass though; go through long checklists and committees and people so that no one person can be held responsible for any problems. The closest thing you'll see in tech will be at back-end software like banks, insurance companies, pension funds, investment companies, embedded engineering / SCADA, ERP systems, etc. The "move fast and break things" mindset seems to mainly be a thing in Silicon Valley internet companies / start-ups, and mainly the latter because they're driven to pump up their own value instead of provide reliable software. Because if Twitter is down, it's an inconvenience, but if airplane software fails, lives are on the line.

tomrod 4y ago

> Agencies like the FAA are notoriously risk adverse. There is a difference from risk averse ("we require heavy testing before deployment") and dysfunctional ("we are terrified of breaking anything but are unwilling to invest in maintenance"). Take the Air Force. Their risk decision is: can we accomplish a specific mission at hand with ideally minimal loss of warfigher life. If they don't maintain their planes, they cannot achieve the warfighter life loss minimization. Similar with IT generally. Kicking the can down the road just grows the problem.

vikingerik 4y ago

When that risk-adverse culture is carried over to another space, it just fails and never gets noticed. Risk-adverse organizations get outcompeted by more efficient risk-tolerant ones, every time that such competition is possible. Risk aversion only works for an entity that has a forcible monopoly in its space. The FAA and FDA do. Another is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which exhibits the same behavior: their job is to prevent accidents, and the surest way to do that is to never approve anything at all.

Tangurena2 4y ago

The early aviation industry had a very substantial "move fast and break stuff" mentality. YouTube has plenty of videos of those folks. However "break stuff" usually meant smearing aircraft and bodies all over the landscape. Much of FAA's regulation is to try to prevent killing "too many" people. If the engine on your car stops, you can usually pull over to the side of the road. If the engine on your aircraft stops, you're going to be landing soon and hopefully not landing on a building full of people. And if you're really lucky when the engine stops, all the people sitting in the back can walk away. The FAA is frequently called a "tombstone agency" - who only act long after fatal accidents and the bodies have been buried.