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Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded.
by subroutine 3y ago
Interesting to see this on HN. I currently work for the company that redesigned the HMI/UI following this incident. Or rather, it's how my company was founded. In the aftermath, the US Navy Command in San Diego contacted several UCSD professors in the Cognitive Science and Psychology department who specialized in high-impact decision making under stress and cognitive load. The Navy was apparently impressed with the detailed analysis and recs provided by these faculty and continued to collaborate with these folks on this an other projects. Eventually they were getting so much work from the Navy they founded a company focused on human factors engineering and interface design for complex systems.
The two original founders recently retired and our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt.
- astrobase_go 3y agoI think your company is PSE, correct?
- smcl 3y agoI think if they wanted to name the company they would have done so in the comment
- gchamonlive 3y agoOr at least frame it in a more passive tone like "would you be comfortable disclaiming the name of the company where you work?"
- krisoft 3y agoThere have been only 5 "former Captain of the USS Zumwalt". That is a very small subset of humans. There have been more humans walking on the moon than former Captains of the USS Zumwalt. Their names are a matter of public record and one can answer which works as a CEO with 5 simple google searches. If they didn't want to name the company they shouldn't have identified it willingly and precisely.
- withinboredom 3y agoI don't want to know the company's name, but it's interesting to know the history of this event and how it came about. If people want to do sleuthing, have fun.
- lupusreal 3y agoMaking clear allusions to the company without directly naming it allows anybody in this conversation who cares to figure it out easily, but doesn't get this discussion automatically indexed with that company's name. Naming the company in a response is rude and unnecessary.
- jen729w 3y agoDisagree. I sometimes have cause to comment here and obliquely reference my own project, without its name. Because its name isn’t important to the context, and mentioning it seems gauche; I don’t want to ‘make the conversation about me’. It’s not because I really don’t want anyone here to know about it: if that was the case, I would have kept my trap shut in the first place.
- renewiltord 3y agoI, for one, am glad it was mentioned. There's nothing secret about it and it saves me some trouble. Thanks for taking one for the team, Guy who figured it out
- k8sToGo 3y agoSame here. With all the detail provided it’s not hard to figure out the company. Btw. You can vouch for comments that are marked dead to revive them.
- subroutine 3y agoIndeed it is! I'm fine with our name being mentioned. I didn't include it above because our website is trash, which doesn't bode well for a company with professional graphics designers and human factors engineers on staff haha.
- jayp1418 3y agoThis is how every software UI should be designed as well.
- withinboredom 3y agoHopefully without people having to die first.
- 93po 3y agodoes the developer dying inside a little bit while making it count?
- dmix 3y agoFun fact the Captain of the Vincennes went to school for psychology and his father was a US Navy Psychologist in WW2.
- lostlogin 3y agoFrom the wiki: “Rogers' next assignment was as commanding officer of the United States Navy Tactical Training Group at Naval Base Point Loma, a group responsible for training officers in handling combat situations.” Is having that guy train people genius, or moronic? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Rogers_III https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_C._Rogers_III
- angiosperm 3y agoArguably moronic, if as appears he disclaimed responsibility for the failure, and even criticized the captain and crew of the Sides for failing to replicate it. At the time of the incident, it appears he had driven his ship into Iranian territorial water, in violation of international maritime law, on an invalid pretext in violation of a direct order from fleet. At least he was "passed over for promotion to flag rank", and retired three years later, at age 53. One wonders how much responsibility he admitted in his book, "Storm Center: A Personal Account of Tragedy & Terrorism". His wife might not have been exposed to the pipe bomb somebody put in his minivan just a year after the incident, had he demonstrated any contrition at the time.
- psunavy03 3y agoOf course he was passed over for flag. At Commander and above, it's more or less expected that you have a successful Commanding Officer tour in rank order to promote. A few Commanders that don't get command make Captain, but it's the exception rather than the rule. And it's virtually unheard of to make flag without a successful Captain command, because there are so many more Captains than there are slots for Rear Admiral (Lower Half) that most end up retiring anyway. If your CO tour blows up in your face, it's basically a guarantee that you will be expected to retire at the earliest possible opportunity. The best quote I've ever heard on the subject is "the Navy doesn't have hospitals for careers. It has leper colonies."
- waihtis 3y agoAny good reading on this? Might be some interesting learning opportunities for (cyber)security monitoring, which is a total mess right now. Stakes are a bit less severe, but still.
- billbrown 3y agoI suggest you check out the work of Gary Klein and the Naturalistic Decision Making community, as the Vicennes work was one of the founding projects. He features it in his 1997 book _Sources of Power_.
- csours 3y agoConvenience links: https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-Decisions/dp/0262611465 https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-Decisions/d... https://www.hpb.com/search?q=sources+of+power+klein&search-button=&lang=en_US https://www.hpb.com/search?q=sources+of+power+klein&search-b...
- handy2000 3y agoApologies for hijacking the conversation. Would you be able to recommend any reading specifically on complex UI for critical operations?
- kqr 3y agoIt's probably not what you are looking for but the DoD Design Criteria for Human Engineering are pretty good.
- jonah 3y agoDonald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great intro to human factors and covers a number of high-stakes environments as well as more mundane things like door handles. Highly recommended reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
- 3y ago
- rbanffy 3y ago> our new CEO is a former Captain of the USS Zumwalt. Wait! Wasn't the last captain of the Zumwalt called James Kirk?
- pesfandiar 3y agoSoftware engineers sometimes wonder about the importance of their jobs by comparing them to other engineering fields where mistakes can hurt or kill fellow human beings. And then there are jobs that hurt or kill regardless of the quality of your work.
- subroutine 3y agoI'm not sure what you are implying. The nature of the work described above was to prevent a disaster like the shooting down of commercial Flight 655 from ever happening again.
- cutemonster 3y agoYes precisely, and (to GP) that's software and UX design. Not comparing with, it's that exact thing (in that case)
- pesfandiar 3y agoNothing personal, just interesting to see how engineers think about how their work can harm other humans, yet some jobs are about creating machines or weapons meant for destruction.
- harshbutfair 3y agoIn my previous job writing a naval combat system (not Aegis) I figured that I couldn't prevent warships from existing, but I could make the combat system better, safer, easier and less error-prone to use which would ultimately reduce the likelihood of people being killed inadvertently. But I totally respect people who choose not to work in defence.
- psunavy03 3y agoGo read about the software bug that literally killed people by miscalculating the radiation dose given by a medical machine. There is software which can hurt or kill fellow human beings. Industrial controls, aircraft flight controls, the list goes on.