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I don't work for Raytheon, but I use a lot of their equipment and deal with their engineers fairly often when stuff doesn't work. The government is weird. Espe

I don't work for Raytheon, but I use a lot of their equipment and deal with their engineers fairly often when stuff doesn't work. The government is weird. Especially when it comes to contracts. There's a massive process that goes on come procurement time - years are spent deciding who is going to get the contract, who is going to develop the technology, who is going to do the manufacturing, etc. Thousands of questions get asked and trillions of dollars are on the line. Contractors spend lots of money bribing, er, "promoting" their companies and explaining why they should be the ones to get the contract. Then the contract gets awarded. And, well, the oversight pretty much stops there. Once you have the contract, you've won. You're in the money. And there's very few checks and balances going on to make sure that your product actually works. They're going through this problem right now with Lockheed Martin and the F-35. They've gone through three failed deadlines and massive cost overruns... and nothing has happened. Nothing adverse. Just, "Here's more money, please fix it. Oh, and you're very bad people." Don't worry, though - when the next plane needs to be built, you'll still be on the short-list for who gets the contract. The culture in an organization that exists off of this system is also really, really weird. It's not "Make a good product." It's "Make something that, at a cursory glance, looks like a good product." The two are treated the same, but the latter is rewarded much more because it's easier to put sham features onto something and takes much less effort. An engineer who works his ass off and perfectly fulfills three features in a system gets overshadowed by the engineer who makes a garbage implementation of ten features. Then comes testing time, and the thing is obviously borked to shit. Well, here comes redesign time! There's no punitive measures on it - after all, design is completely different from the field, right? This stuff happens. So here's another 120 billion dollars, let's fix this thing. Wash, rinse, repeat. If you do it right, you can make a product that requires incremental improvement over its entire lifespan instead of making it correctly the first time. The result - everyone makes more money. And the government doesn't really care because it's playing with Monopoly money anyway. It's the end of August in my shop - my captain and master sergeant are sitting there saying, "We need to spend the remaining 20% of our budget on something. No, I don't care what it is. Justify it and figure it out, otherwise our budget will be reduced and we'll be fucked when something big comes up next year." Now - inside this company, no one is actually saying to bork the project and show the 5th consecutive overfulfillment of the Five-Year-Plan. But you'll find that the engineers are not as good as they pretend to be, (their massive achievements are either flawed or completely made up) the managers are competing with each other for these massive made-up achievements, and the people in charge of the company are doublethinking making a good product and borking the shit out of it so that they can say, "We built this thing, so we're obviously the best choice to keep improving it." It's completely batshit insane, and if you value any sense of reality, stay the hell away from any company that deals with the government. The benefits are really, really nice though.

mikecane 13y ago
Too Big To Fail. So it went from being applied to defense contractors to banks and certain brokerages.
- omegaham 13y ago
  In this case, it's just due to sunk costs. You've already given this defense contractor a trillion dollars. Ten years later, the contractor has a flawed project with a lot of holes in it... but what can you do? If you cut them off, then you have this shitty product that you've already spent a trillion dollars on. Getting someone else to fix it (or develop something else entirely) would cost even more. So you grit your teeth and pay them the 200 billion that they need to redesign and fix it. And then, when they still have a fucked up product a year later, you're facing the exact same problem... except now you've spent 1.2 trillion dollars. The interesting thing is that in the long-term, it's actually a good idea to tell the contractor to fuck off. The contractor then goes out of business, and the rest of them change their tune really fast. Meet your fucking deadlines, or we'll cut you off regardless of the cost. The end result would be much more realistic cost estimates, better timelines, and a much smaller chance of fuckery. Of course, tell that to the project director who is getting hounded by Congress and is looking for the most cost-effective (short-term) way out. In the brokerage and bank case, it's due to the government saying, "Well, we can go off of principle and tell them to go through bankruptcy like everyone else. But if we do that, then the economy will tank and we'll be looking at trillions of dollars in damages. So we'll pay the couple hundred billion dollars that we need to keep that from happening." Unfortunately, that leads to the exact same thing as the contractors - these banks say, "Well, then all we need to do to get free money from the government is to get into the position where it costs more money to do the right thing than pay us off for making bad decisions!"
- Zigurd 13y ago
  It is also due to capping the profit on a contract. The only way to make more money is to enlarge the problem. Some general wants a gold-plated titanium feature? "YES SIR!" "Here is the change order for your signature, SIR!" Yet if you don't cap the profit, there is incentive to cut corners. So you lose, or you lose.
- 13y ago

mikecane 13y ago

Too Big To Fail. So it went from being applied to defense contractors to banks and certain brokerages.

omegaham 13y ago
In this case, it's just due to sunk costs. You've already given this defense contractor a trillion dollars. Ten years later, the contractor has a flawed project with a lot of holes in it... but what can you do? If you cut them off, then you have this shitty product that you've already spent a trillion dollars on. Getting someone else to fix it (or develop something else entirely) would cost even more. So you grit your teeth and pay them the 200 billion that they need to redesign and fix it. And then, when they still have a fucked up product a year later, you're facing the exact same problem... except now you've spent 1.2 trillion dollars. The interesting thing is that in the long-term, it's actually a good idea to tell the contractor to fuck off. The contractor then goes out of business, and the rest of them change their tune really fast. Meet your fucking deadlines, or we'll cut you off regardless of the cost. The end result would be much more realistic cost estimates, better timelines, and a much smaller chance of fuckery. Of course, tell that to the project director who is getting hounded by Congress and is looking for the most cost-effective (short-term) way out. In the brokerage and bank case, it's due to the government saying, "Well, we can go off of principle and tell them to go through bankruptcy like everyone else. But if we do that, then the economy will tank and we'll be looking at trillions of dollars in damages. So we'll pay the couple hundred billion dollars that we need to keep that from happening." Unfortunately, that leads to the exact same thing as the contractors - these banks say, "Well, then all we need to do to get free money from the government is to get into the position where it costs more money to do the right thing than pay us off for making bad decisions!"
Zigurd 13y ago
It is also due to capping the profit on a contract. The only way to make more money is to enlarge the problem. Some general wants a gold-plated titanium feature? "YES SIR!" "Here is the change order for your signature, SIR!" Yet if you don't cap the profit, there is incentive to cut corners. So you lose, or you lose.
13y ago