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Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launch, exposed cover-up (2021)

GuB-42
65 replies
3h19m

I wonder how often things like that happen.

The launch could have gone right, and no one would have known anything about the decision process besides a few insiders. I am sure that on project as complex and as risky as a Space Shuttle, there is always an engineer that is not satisfied with some aspect, for some valid reason. But at some point, one needs to launch the thing, despite the complains. How many projects luckily succeeded after a reckless decision?

In many accidents, we can point at an engineer who foreshadowed it, as it is the case here. Usually followed by blaming those who proceeded anyways. But these decision makers are in a difficult position. Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be done. So, whose "no" to ignore? Not Allan's apparently.

former_navy
12 replies
2h4m

Often.

I used to run the nuclear power plant on a US Navy submarine. Back around 2006, we were sailing somewhere and Sonar reported that the propulsion plant was much, much louder than normal. A few days later we didn't need Sonar to report it, we could hear it ourselves. The whole rear half of the ship was vibrating. We pulled into our destination port, and the topside watch reported that oil pools were appearing in the water near the rear end of the ship. The ship's Engineering Officer and Engineering Department Master Chief shrugged it off and said there was no need for it to "affect ship's schedule". I was in charge of the engineering library. I had a hunch and I went and read a manual that leadership had probably never heard of. The propeller that drives the ship is enormous. It's held in place with a giant nut, but in between the nut and the propeller is a hydraulic tire, a toroidal balloon filled with hydraulic fluid. Clearly it had ruptured. The manual said the ship was supposed to immediately sail to the nearest port and the ship was not allowed to go back out to sea until the tire was replaced. I showed it to the Engineer. Several officers called me in to explain it to them. And then, nothing. Ship's Schedule was not affected, and we continued on the next several-week trip. Before we got to the next port, we had to limit the ship's top speed to avoid major damage to the entire propulsion plant. We weren't able to conduct the mission we had planned because the ship was too loud. And the multiple times I asked what the hell was going on, management literally just talked over me. When we got to the next port, we had to stay there while the propeller was removed and remachined. Management doesn't give a shit as long as it doesn't affect their next promotion.

Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.

psunavy03
5 replies
1h47m

The correct answer in that case is to go to the Inspector General. That's what they're there for. Leaders sweeping shit under the rug that ends up crippling a fleet asset and preventing tasking from higher is precisely the kind of negligence and incompetence the IG is designed to root out.

And I say that as a retired officer.

richie-guix
3 replies
1h21m

How long retired? Things have gone in what can only be described as an.. incomprehensible unfathomable direction in the last decade or so. Parent post is not surprising in the least.

Politics is seeping where it doesn't belong.

I am very worried.

HeatrayEnjoyer
2 replies
1h7m

Tell us more... what has happened?

richie-guix
0 replies
55m

To a first approximation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZB7xEonjsc

Less funny in real life. Sometimes the jizzless thing falls off with impeccably bad timing. Right when things go boom. People get injured (no deaths yet). Limp home early. Allies let down. Shipping routes elongate by a sad multiple. And it even affects you directly as you pay extra for that Dragon silicon toy you ordered from China.

dontlikeyoueith
0 replies
16m

Just google the Red Hill failure.

The Navy's careerist, bureaucratic incompetence is staggering. No better than Putin's generals who looted the military budget and crippled his army so they couldn't even beat a military a fraction of their size.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
14m

Honest question: what are the plausible outcomes for an engineer who reports this kind of issue to the IG?

I'm guessing there's a real possibility of it ending his career, at least as a member of the military.

quacked
2 replies
54m

Don't even get me started on the nuclear safety problems.

I want to be pro-nuclear energy, but I just don't think I can trust the majority of human institutions to handle nuclear plants.

What do you think about the idea of replacing all global power production with nuclear, given that it would require many hundreds of thousands of loosely-supervised people running nuclear plants?

somenameforme
0 replies
7m

There's also the issue of force majeure - war, terrorism, natural disasters, and so on. Increase the number of these and not only can you not really maintain the same level of diligence, but you also increase the odds of them ending up in an unfortunate location or event.

There's also the issue of the uranium. Breeder reactors can help increase efficiency, but they bump up all the complexities/risks greatly. Relatively affordable uranium is a limited resource. We have vast quantities of it in the ocean, but it's not really feasible to extract. It's at something like 3.3 parts per billion by mass. So you'd need to filter a billion kg of ocean water to get 3.3kg of uranium. Outside of cost/complexity, you also run into ecological issues at that scale.

MostlyStable
0 replies
10m

Considering that 1 Chernobyl scale accident per year would kill fewer people than global coal power does, I personally would be for it.

orblivion
1 replies
1h54m

Is this a different phenomenon though? It seems that there's a difference between an informed risk assessment and not giving a fuck or letting the bureaucratic gears turn and not feeling responsible. Like there's a difference between Challenger and Chernobyl.

But, maybe someone can make a case that it's fundamentally the same thing?

quacked
0 replies
50m

I would make the case that it's fundamentally the same thing.

In both cases, there were people who cared primarily about the technical truth, and those people were overruled by people who cared primarily about their own lifestyle (social status, reputation, career, opportunities, loyalties, personal obligations, etc.) In Allan McDonald's book "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" he outlines how Morton Thiokol was having a contract renewal held over their head while NASA Marshall tried to maneuver the Solid Rocket Booster production contract to a second source, which would have seriously affect MT's bottom line and profit margins. There's a strong implication that Morton Thiokol was not able to adhere to proper technical rationale and push back on their customer (NASA) because if they had they would have given too much ammunition to NASA to argue for a second-source for the SRB contracts. (In short: "you guys delayed launches over issues in your hardware, so we're only going to buy 30 SRB flight sets from you over the next 5 years instead of 60 as we initially promised."

I have worked as a NASA contractor on similar issues, although much less directly impacting the crews than the SRBs. You are not free to pursue the smartest, most technically accurate, quickest method for fixing problems; if you introduce delays that your NASA contacts and managers don't like, they will likely ding your contract and redirect some of your company's work to your direct competitors, who you're often working with on your projects.

KennyBlanken
0 replies
1h25m

If you're EB, why replace a hydraulic bushing when you can wait, and replace it but also have to repair a bunch of damage and make yourself a nice big extra chunk of change off Uncle Sam?

If you're ship's captain...why not help secure a nice 'consulting' 'job' at EB after retiring from the navy by helping EB make millions, and count on your officers to not say a peep to fleet command that the mess was preventable?

ein0p
10 replies
2h27m

Saying "no" is easy and safe

Not in my experience. Saying no to something major when others don’t see a problem can easily be career-ending.

barbazoo
5 replies
2h16m

easily be career-ending.

Easily be career ending? That's a bit dramatic, don't you think?. Someone who continuously says no to things will surely not thrive and probably eventually leave the organization, one way or the other, that's probably right.

ein0p
2 replies
1h53m

Ask Snowden.

Aloisius
1 replies
1h35m

Saying no isn't what ended his career.

WarOnPrivacy
0 replies
59m

Saying no isn't what ended his career.

Within NatSec, saying No to embarrassing the government is implied. Ceaselessly.

Equally implied: The brutality of the consequences for not saying no.

madaxe_again
1 replies
2h12m

Not even slightly dramatic. I have seen someone be utterly destroyed for trying to speak out on something deeply unethical a state was doing, and is probably still doing.

He was dragged by the head of state in the press and televised announcements, became untouchable overnight - lost his career, his wife died a few days later while at work at her government job in an “accident”. This isn’t in some tinpot dictatorship, rather a liberal western democracy.

So - no. Career-ending is an understatement. You piss the wrong people off, they will absolutely fuck you up.

quacked
0 replies
45m

I have long thought that there ought to be an independently funded International Association for the Protection of Whistleblowers. However, it would quickly become a primary target of national intelligence agencies, so I don't know how long it would last.

Brian_K_White
3 replies
2h16m

Everyone seems to be reading this too simply. In fact, stupidly.

It's conceptually the easiest answer to the risk of asserting that you are certain, is simply don't assert that you are certain.

They aren't saying it's easy to face your bosses with anything they don't want to hear.

lolinder
2 replies
1h59m

Isn't the definition of "easy" or "hard" that includes the external human pressures the less simple/stupid one? What is the utility of a definition of "easy" that assumes that you work in complete isolation?

Brian_K_White
1 replies
1h51m

Context.

lolinder
0 replies
1h47m

The context to this conversation is the launch of a space shuttle that's supposed to carry a teacher to space. It has both enormous stakes and enormous political pressure to not delay/cancel. I'm unsure why that context makes the spherical cow version of "easy" a sensible one.

jajko
8 replies
3h6m

But at some point, one needs to launch the thing

Do they? Even if risks are not mitigated and say risk for catastrophe can't be pushed below ie 15%? This ain't some app startup world where failure will lose a bit of money and time, and everybody moves on.

I get the political forces behind, nobody at NASA was/is probably happy with those, and most politicians are basically clueless clowns (or worse) chasing popularity polls and often wielding massive decisive powers over matters they barely understand at surface level.

But you can't cheat reality and facts, not more than say in casino.

ahmeneeroe-v2
7 replies
3h3m

Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket launch, but I always think about European exploration of the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners built empires on those achievements.

So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the thing.

whyever
3 replies
2h8m

This sounds like you are saying colonialism was a success story?

lkbm
2 replies
1h24m

For the ones doing the colonizing? Overwhelmingly yes. A good potion of the issues with colonizing is about how the colonizing nations end up extracting massive amounts of resources for their own benefit.

kerkeslager
1 replies
1h15m

In context, it sounds like you think that the genocide of indigenous peoples was totally worth it for European nations and that callous lack of concern for human life and suffering is an example to be followed by modern space programs.

I'd like to cut you the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not what you meant; if that's the case, please clarify.

bigstrat2003
0 replies
14m

You are not reading the context correctly. The original point was that establishing colonies was very risky, to which whyever implied that colonialism was not a success story. But in fact it was extremely successful from a risk analysis point of view. Some nations chose to risk lives and it paid off quite well for them. The nuance of how the natives were treated is frankly irrelevant to this analysis, because we're asking "did the risk pay off", not "did they do anything wrong".

kerkeslager
0 replies
1h21m

Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket launch, but I always think about European exploration of the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners built empires on those achievements.

So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the thing.

This comment sounds an awful lot like you think the genocide of indigenous peoples is justified by the fact that the winners built empires, but I'd like to assume you intended to say something better. If you did intend to say something better, please clarify.

jajko
0 replies
2h7m

I would somewhat agree with first launch, first moon mission and so on, but N-th in a row ain't building no new empires. Its business as usual.

bluefirebrand
0 replies
2h5m

I think ultimately the problem is of accountability

If the risks are high and there are a lot of warning signs, there needs to be strong punishment for pushing ahead anyways and ignoring the risk

It is much too often that people in powerful positions are very cavalier with the lives or livelihoods of many people they are supposed to be responsible for, and we let them get away with being reckless far too often

caseyy
5 replies
2h3m

A lot of people are taking issue with the fact that you need to say yes for progress. I don’t know how one could always say no and expect to have anything done.

Every kind of meaningful success involves negotiating risk instead of seizing up in the presence of it.

The shuttle probably could have failed in 1,000 different ways and eventually, it would have. But they still went to space with it.

Some risk is acceptable. If I were to go to the moon, let’s say, I would accept a 50% risk of death. I would be happy to do it. Other people would accept a risk of investment and work hour loss. It’s not so black or white that you wouldn’t go if there’s any risk.

runlaszlorun
2 replies
1h37m

I would accept a 50% risk of death.

No offense but this sounds like the sayings of someone who has not ever seen a 50% of death.

It’s a little different 3 to 4 months out. It’s way different the night before and morning. Stepping “in the arena” with odds like those, I’d say the vast, vast majority will back out and/or break down sobbing if forced.

There’s a small percent who will go forward but admit the fact that they were completely afraid- and rightly so.

Then you have that tiny percentage that are completely calm and you’d swear had a tiny smile creeping in…

I’ve never been an astronaut.

But I did spend three years in and out of Bosnia with a special operations task force.

Honestly? I have a 1% rule. The things might have a 20-30% chance of death of clearly stupid and no one wants to do. Things will a one in a million prob aren’t gonna catch ya. But I figure that if something does, it’s gonna be an activity that I do often but has a 1% chance of going horribly wrong and that I’m ignoring.

WalterBright
0 replies
42m

No offense but this sounds like the sayings of someone who has not ever seen a 50% of death.

The space program pilots saw it. And no, I would not have flown on those rockets. After all, NASA would "man rate" a new rocket design with only one successful launch.

2shortplanks
0 replies
1h19m

50% of the time doing something that has a one percent chance of killing you 69 times will kill you

lolinder
0 replies
1h51m

The key thing with Challenger is that the engineers working on the project estimated the risk to be extremely high and refused to budge, eventually being overruled by the executives of their company.

That's different than the engineers calculating the risk of failure at some previously-defined-as-acceptable level and giving the go-ahead.

kerkeslager
0 replies
1h46m

Some risk is acceptable. If I were to go to the moon, let’s say, I would accept a 50% risk of death. I would be happy to do it. Other people would accept a risk of investment and work hour loss. It’s not so black or white that you wouldn’t go if there’s any risk.

It's possible you're just suicidal, but I'm reading this more as false internet bravado. A 50% risk of death on a mission to space is totally unacceptable. It's not like anyone will die if you don't go now; you can afford to take the time to eliminate all known risks of this magnitude.

afavour
4 replies
2h32m

at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks

Do they though? If the Challenger launch had been pushed back what major effects would there have been?

I do get your general point but in this specific example it seems the urgency to launch wasn’t particularly warranted.

ben_jones
1 replies
2h26m

If the Challenger launch had been pushed back what major effects would there have been?

An administrator would’ve missed a promotion.

runlaszlorun
0 replies
1h33m

I think it’s not even a missed promotion but a perceived risk of one- which may or may not be accurate.

mathgradthrow
0 replies
2h27m

you need to establish which complaints can delay a launch. The parent comment is arguing that you need to set some kind of threshold on that. In practice, airplanes fly a little bit broken all the time. We have excellent data and theory and failsafes which allow that to be the case, but it's written in blood.

jstanley
0 replies
52m

If the Challenger launch had been pushed back what major effects would there have been?

The point is it's not just the Challenger launch. It's every launch.

recursive
3 replies
2h5m

Presumably about the same as they did prior to their first launch. Space travel is not like commercial air travel. This is part of the deal.

kerkeslager
2 replies
1h32m

Hard disagree. The idea that the machinery your life will depend on might be made with half-assed safety in mind is definitely not part of the deal.

Astronauts (and anyone intelligent who intentionally puts themselves in a life-threatening situation) have a more nuanced understanding of risk than can be represented by a single % risk of death number. "I'm going to space with the best technology humanity has to offer keeping me safe" is a very different risk proposition from "I'm going to space in a ship with known high-risk safety issues".

iamthirsty
0 replies
1h6m

Hard disagree. The idea that the machinery your life will depend on might be made with half-assed safety in mind is definitely not part of the deal.

It's definitely built in. The Apollo LM was .15mm thick aluminum, meaning almost any tiny object could've killed them.

The Space Shuttle flew with SSRB's that were solid-fuel and unstoppable when lit.

Columbia had 2 ejection seats, which were eventually taken out and not installed on any other shuttle.

Huge risk is inherently the deal with space travel, at least from its inception until now.

WalterBright
0 replies
52m

the best technology humanity has to offer keeping me safe

Nobody can afford the best technology humanity has to offer. As one adds more 9's to the odds of success, the cost increases exponentially. There is no end to it.

pseudosavant
2 replies
1h28m

My understanding of the Space Shuttle program is that there were a lot of times they knew they probably shouldn't fly, or try to land, and they lucked out and didn't lose the orbiter. It is shocking they only lost two ships out of the 135 Space Shuttle missions.

The safety posture of that whole program, for a US human space program, seemed bad. That they chose to use solid rocket motors shows that they were willing to compromise on human safety from the get-go. There are reasons there hasn't ever been even one other human-rated craft to use solid rocket motors.

floating-io
1 replies
57m

Except SLS?

Not that I think it's a good thing, but...

pseudosavant
0 replies
23m

I forgot about the SLS until after I wrote that. SLS makes most of the same mistakes, plus plenty of new expensive ones, from the Space Shuttle program. SLS has yet to carry a human passenger though.

Its mind boggling that SLS still exists at all. At least $1B-$2B in costs whether you launch or not. A launch cadence measured in years. $2B-$4B if you actually launch it. And it doesn't even lift more than Starship, which is launching almost quarterly already. This before we even talk about reusability, or that a reusable Starship + Super Heavy launch would only use about $2M of propellent.

elviejo79
2 replies
1h39m

It happens extremely frequently because there is almost no downside for management to override the engineers decision.

Even in the case of the Challenger, no single article say WHO was the executive that finally approved the launch. No body was jailed for gross negligence. Even Ricahrd Feynman felt that the investigative comission was biased from the start.

So, since there is no "price to pay" to make this bad calls they are continuously made.

WalterBright
1 replies
56m

No body was jailed for gross negligence

Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions, and when you do, you may find they're not the right people for the job.

Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.

It will also mean that people will desperately cover up mistakes rather than being open about it, meaning the mistakes do not get corrected. We see this in play where manufacturers won't fix problems because fixing a problem is an admission of liability for the consequences of those problems, and punishment.

Even the best, most conscientious people make mistakes. Jailing them is not going to be helpful, it will just make things worse.

Anotheroneagain
0 replies
39m

Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions,

Why do you think you want it? You don't want it.

ufmace
1 replies
2h46m

That's the thing I always wonder about these things.

It's fun and easy to provide visibility into whoever called out an issue early when it does go on to cause a big failure. It gives a nice smug feeling to whoever called it out internally, the reporters who report it, and the readers in the general public who read the resulting story.

The actual important thing that we hardly ever get much visibility into is - how many potential failures were called out by how many people how many times. How many of those things went on to cause a big, or even small, failure, and how many were nothingburgers in the end. Without that, it's hard to say whether leaders were appropriately downplaying "chicken little" warnings to satisfy a market or political need, and got caught by one actually being a big deal, or whether they really did recklessly ignore a called-out legitimate risk. It's easy to say you should take everything seriously and over-analyze everything, but at some point you have to make a move, or you lose. You don't get nearly as much second-guessing when you spend too much time analyzing phantom risks and end up losing to your competitors.

autoexec
0 replies
2h5m

The actual important thing that we hardly ever get much visibility into is - how many potential failures were called out by how many people how many times.

I'm not sure that's important at all. Every issue raised needs to be evaluated independently. If there is strong evidence that a critical part of a space shuttle is going to fail there should be zero discussion about how many times in the past other people thought other things might go wrong when in the end nothing did. What matters is the likelihood that this current thing will cause a disaster this time based on the current evidence, not on historical statistics

The point where you "have to make a move" should only come after you can be reasonably sure that you aren't needlessly sending people to their deaths.

nurbl
1 replies
1h57m

What makes you say it "could have gone right"? From what came out about the o-rings behavior at cold temperatures, it seems they were taking a pretty big risk. Your perspective seems to be that it's always a coin toss no matter what, and I don't think that is true. Were there engineers speaking up in this way at every successful launch too?

JoshuaRogers
0 replies
1h52m

I think what they were saying, especially given the phrasing “How many projects luckily succeeded after a reckless decision?” is that, if things hadn’t failed we would never have known and thus how many other failures of procedure/ ethics have we just not seen because the worst case failed to occur.

ReptileMan
1 replies
2h25m

Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be done.

True, but that is for cases where you take the risk yourself. If the challenger crew knew the risk and were - fuck it - it's worth it it would have been different than a bureaucrat chasing a promotion.

bluefirebrand
0 replies
2h3m

Especially when that bureaucrat probably suffered no consequences for making the wrong call. Essentially letting other people take all of the risk while accepting none. No demotion, no firing, and even if they did get fired they probably got some kind of comfy pension or whatever

It's a joke

ApolloFortyNine
1 replies
2h19m

I've always thought the same, that something like space travel is inherently incredibly dangerous. I mean surely someone during the Apollo program spoke out about something. Like landing on the moon with an untested engine being the only way back for instance.

Nixon even had a 'if they died' speech prepared, so someone had to put the odds of success not at 100.

WalterBright
0 replies
54m

Neil Armstrong figured that he only had a 50% chance of making it back from the moon alive.

lolinder
0 replies
2h41m

Saying "no" is easy and safe, but at some point, one needs to say "yes" and take risks, otherwise nothing would be done.

Saying "no" is easy and safe in a world where there are absolutely no external pressures to get stuff done. Unfortunately, that world doesn't exist, and the decision makers in these kinds of situations face far more pressure to say "yes" than they do to say "no".

For example, see the article:

The NASA official simply said that Thiokol had some concerns but approved the launch. He neglected to say that the approval came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from NASA officials, overruled the engineers.
dylan604
0 replies
2h45m

Can't we apply the same logic to the current Starliner situation. There's no way it should have launched, but someone brow beat others into saying it was an acceptable risk with the known issues to go ahead with the launch. Okay, so the launch was successful, but other issues that were known and suspect then caused problems after launch to the point they are not positive it can return. So, should it have launched? Luckily, at least to this point, nobody has been hurt/killed, and the vehicle is somewhat still intact.

vouaobrasil
53 replies
6h39m

It's a shame we don't have more engineers today that refuse to invent things because so many technological inventions today are being used to further the destruction of our planet through consumerism.

Sadly, human society has a blind spot when it comes to inventions with short-term benefits but long-term detriments.

I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.

sph
28 replies
6h30m

I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.

Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. I refuse to work on (or use) AI, ads and defence projects, and I'm far from being the only one.

Though let who is free of sin throw the first stone, I now stand on a high horse after having worked in the gambling sector, and now ashamed of it, so I prefer to focus the projects themselves rather than the people and what they choose to do for a living.

sweettea
10 replies
6h1m

I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.

throwuxiytayq
3 replies
5h42m

I tend to view ads as the perfect opposite of what you mentioned; it’s an enormous waste of money and resources on a global scale that provides no tangible benefit for anyone that isn’t easily and cheaply replaced by vastly superior options.

If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.

IggleSniggle
1 replies
5h6m

We do have such sites though, like Tom's Hardware or Consumer Reports or Wirecutter or what have you. Consumers pay money for these ads to reduce the conflict of interest, but companies still need to get their products chosen for these review pipelines.

autoexec
0 replies
1h30m

Tom's Hardware and Consumer Reports aren't really about ads (or at least that's not what made them popular). they were about trying to determine the truth about products and see past the lies told about them by advertising.

autoexec
0 replies
1h38m

If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing.

There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and not about making product decisions.

Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways that many artists have been able to make a comfortable living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take more of their money or influence their opinions isn't exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of art that would not have happened otherwise.

Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from extremely shortsighted companies who should have been delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare, low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how much of that came from poor choices (like paying for insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought up and came back requiring a subscription at which point I stopped paying any attention to it.

wizzwizz4
0 replies
5h46m

I also believe advertisements are useful! However, by this definition, the ad industry is not engaged in advertisement.

myrmidon
0 replies
5h43m

To me, ads are primarily a way to extract more value from ad-viewers by stochastically manipulating their behavior.

There is a lot of support in favor. Consider:

- Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a very small minority.

- If product introduction was the primary purpose, then repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to shift your spending/consumption habits.

- Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality tradeoffs honestly.

autoexec
0 replies
1h51m

Ads are most often manipulation, not information. They are pollution.

asoneth
0 replies
4h26m

Back when I was a professor I would give a lecture on ethical design near the end of the intro course. In my experience, most people who think critically about ethics eventually arrive at their own personal ethics which are rarely uniform.

For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to building military AI than work for an advertising company, no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.

_kb
0 replies
5h4m

Products (and particularly ideas) can be explored in a pull pattern too. Pushing things—physical items, concepts of identity, or political ideology—in the fashion endemic to the ad industry is a pretty surefire way to end up with an extremely bland society, or one that segments increasingly depending on targeting profile.

Clubber
0 replies
4h13m

I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.

I would agree with you if ads were just that. Here's our product, here's what it does, here's what it costs. Unfortunately ads sell the sizzle not the steak. That has been advertising mantra for probably 100 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW6HmQ1QVMw

sneak
7 replies
5h53m

Avoiding the use of AI is just going to get you lapped.

There’s no benefit to your ideological goals in kneecapping yourself.

There’s nothing morally wrong with using or building AI, or gambling.

Tao3300
3 replies
4h48m

There's a lot baked into that thought, but I wanted to extract this part:

There’s nothing morally wrong with ... building... gambling.

Say you're building a gambling system and building that system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more? Gamble faster?

It creates and feeds addiction.

sneak
1 replies
3h35m

Lots of things create and feed addictions, including baking cookies.

Let’s not confuse the issue. Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it’s bad or morally problematic.

Tao3300
0 replies
5m

I've never seen a homeless person in Atlantic City put his fist through an oven window because the cookies didn't come out right.

slumberlust
0 replies
4h30m

I agree with you. It's also worth noting that this isn't unique to anything discussed here. EVERYONE has their line in the sand on a huge array of issues, and that line falls differently for a lot of people.

Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a personal line associated with it.

vouaobrasil
1 replies
5h28m

The benefit is a clear conscience.

datameta
0 replies
4h46m

In what context? Code generation? Art exploration?

sph
0 replies
1h43m

Wake me up when AI is able to compete with a software engineer with almost two decades in the field.

Hint: most of my consulting rate is not about writing fizzbuzz. Some clients pay me without even having to write a single line of code.

Tao3300
6 replies
5h47m

I also refuse to work on the war machine, blockchain, or gambling.

Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might be cathartic.

doctor_eval
5 replies
5h6m

I’ve been gaslit, I ended up walking away from my company. It was extremely painful.

Doing a little damage might be cathartic.

Please avoid the regret. Do something kind instead. Take the high road. Take care of yourself.

Tao3300
4 replies
5h0m

Kindness doesn't have any dev openings.

doctor_eval
3 replies
4h56m

Of course. But at least try to minimise the damage. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.

Tao3300
2 replies
4h35m

Regret right now would be letting the stress of unemployment rip my family apart. I've got maybe a handful of door-slamming "what the fuck did you do all day then?" rants that I can tolerate before I'm ready to sign on with Blockchain LLM O-Ring Validation as a Service LLC: We Always Return True!™ if it'll pay the bills and get my wife to stop freaking out.

immibis
0 replies
4h9m

And this is how all unjust systems sustain themselves. You WILL participate in the injustice, or be punished SEVERELY. Why do the people doing the punishing want to punish you? Because they WILL participate in punishing, or be punished SEVERELY.

People have wondered how so many people ever participated in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used for all of them.

freeopinion
0 replies
1h25m

It probably doesn't help right now, but you should know you are not the only one in your situation. Perhaps it might help to write down your actual principles. Then compare that list with the real reasons you refuse some employment opportunities.

I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There may be others.

It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing and what your principles allow.

If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all the people in your situation could be used to restore housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other principles?

As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where the underemployed could devote some energy while they licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history on your resume.

How do we get a monthly "What good causes need volunteers?" post on HN?

vouaobrasil
1 replies
5h25m

Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy.

One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand programmers united together not to work on something? Now we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
40m

The issue is quantifying this sentiment. How would you even identify programmers who are doing this? Yet another reason why software engineers really ought to organize their labor like a lot of other disciplines of engineering have done decades ago. Collective action like this would be more easily mustered, advertised, and used to influence outcomes if labor were merely organized and informed of itself.

BLKNSLVR
7 replies
6h30m

If all the programmers working on advertising and tracking and fingerprinting and dark pattern psychology were to move into the field of AI I think that would be a big win.

And that's not saying that AI is going to be great or even good or even overly positive, it's just streets ahead of the alternatives I mentioned.

ModernMech
5 replies
6h21m

I feel like AI is going to be all those things on steroids.

BLKNSLVR
2 replies
4h48m

I'll reply here since your comment was first.

AI has the potential to go in many directions, at least some of which could be societally 'good'.

Advertising is, has always been, and likely always will be, societally 'bad'.

This differentiation, if nothing else.

(Yes, my opinion on advertising is militantly one sided. I'm unlikely to be convinced otherwise, but happy for, and will read, contrary commentary).

Dove
1 replies
1h32m

I don't think it's advertising that's inherently evil. Like government, it's a good thing, even a needed thing. People need laws and courts, and buyers and sellers need to be able to connect.

It turns evil in the presence of corruption. Taking bribes in exchange for power. Government should never make rules for money, but for the good of the people. And advertising should never offer exposure for sale - exposure should only result from merit.

Build an advertising system with integrity - in which truthful and useful ads are not just a minimum requirement but an honest aspiration and the only way to the top of the heap. Build an advertising system focused, not on exploiting the viewer, but on serving them - connecting them with goods and services and ideas and people and experiences that are wanted and that promote their health and thriving.

I won't work on advertising as it's currently understood... I agree it's evil. But I'd work on that, and I think it would be a great good.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
32m

I used to think there were useful ads. But really, even a useful add is an unsolicited derailing of your thoughtspace. You might need a hammer, but did you really have to think about it right then? I think back to how my parents and grandparents got their goods before the internet. If they needed something they went to the store. If they were interested in new stuff that might be useful thats coming out, they'd get a product catalog from some store mailed to them. Is a product catalog an ad? Maybe, depending on how you argue the semantics, but its much more of a situation like going to a restaurant and browsing the menu and choosing best for yourself, vs being shown a picture of a big mac on a billboard every time you leave your home.

Jensson
1 replies
6h10m

Yeah, Google, Facebook and Microsoft putting a massive fraction of their resources on AI is what already happened, but isn't really encouraging.

ModernMech
0 replies
58m

Yeah they are the dark pattern, tracking, advertising l, privacy violating kings. Of course they’re going to keep doing all that “but with AI (TM)”

IggleSniggle
0 replies
5h0m

Is it miles ahead? An engine that ingests a ridiculous amount of data to produce influence? Isn't that just advertising but more efficient and with even less accountability?

throwaway22032
2 replies
5h49m

I no longer work as a software developer because I feel that technology is ruining normal human interactions by substituting them in incomplete ways and making everyone depressed.

I think we'd be better off making things for each other and being present and local rather than trying to hyperstimulate ourselves into oblivion.

I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.

vouaobrasil
0 replies
5h25m

I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.

Doesn't have to be on headlines. Even just hearing that gives me a bit more energy to fight actively against the post-useful developments of modern society. Every little bit helps.

tryauuum
0 replies
4h32m

How do you get money nowadays?

michaelt
2 replies
6h0m

Sadly it's not enough for 99% of engineers to refuse to work on an unethical technology, or even 99.99%

Personally I don't work on advertising/tracking, anything highly polluting, weapons technology, high-interest loans, scams and scam-adjacent tech, and so on.

But there are enough engineers without such concerns to keep the snooping firms, the missile firms, and the payday loan firms in business.

kjkjadksj
0 replies
29m

There are even engineers with such concerns working in these firms. They might figure that the missile is getting built no matter if they work there or not, so they might as well take the job offer.

Frost1x
0 replies
5h43m

One issue we have is that economic pressures underly everything, including ethics. Ethics are often malleable depending on what someone needs to survive and given different situations with resource constraints, people are ultimately more willing to bend ethics.

Now, there’s often limits to some flexibility and lines some simply will not cross, but survival and self preservation tends to take precedent and push those limits. E.g., I can’t imagine ever resorting to cannibalism but Flight 571 with the passengers stranded in the Andes makes a good case for me bending that line. I’d be a lot more willing to work for some scam or in high interest loans for example before resorting to cannibalism to feed myself and I think most people would.

If we assure basic survival at a reasonable level, you might find far less engineers willing to work in any of these spaces. It boils down to what alternatives they have and just how firm they are on some ethical line in the sand. We’d pretty much improve the world all around I’d say. Our economic system doesn’t want that though, it wants to be able to apply this level of pressure on people and so do those who are highly successful who leverage their wealth as power. As such I don’t see how that will ever change, you’ll always have someone doing terrible things depending on who is the most desperate.

ClumsyPilot
2 replies
6h16m

I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.

This is not effective.

Having a regulated profession that is held to some standards, like accountants, would actually work

Without unions and without a professional body individual action won’t be achieving anything

nradov
0 replies
2h54m

So do you think that people should be required to become members of a "regulated profession" before writing a VBA spreadsheet macro, or contributing to an open-source project?

chris_t
0 replies
4h0m

But... accountants do work for AI companies, right? That doesn't seem like a good example.

xeonmc
0 replies
6h32m

"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."

nasaeclipse
0 replies
3h19m

As others have said, a big part of the problem is the need to eat.

I have a family. I work for a company that does stuff for the government.

I'd _rather_ be building and working on my cycling training app all day every day, but that doesn't make me any money, and probably never will.

All the majority of us can hope for is to build something that helps people and society, and hope that does enough good to counteract the morally grey in this world.

Nothing is ever black and white.

hbossy
0 replies
3h47m

I will never forget the grumpy look on the face of a imperial tobacco representative on a job fair in my university years ago. No one was visiting their booth for anything except for silly questions about benefit package including cigarettes.

dylan604
0 replies
2h39m

The problem is that for every one that refuses, there's at least one that will. So standing on principles only works if the rest of the rungs of the ladder above you also have those same principles. If anywhere in the org above you does not, you will be overruled/replaced.

dartos
0 replies
6h35m

If only it were that easy.

A lot of engineers in the US who are both right out of school and are on visas need to find and keep work within a couple months of graduation and can’t be picky with their job or risk getting deported.

We have a fair number of indentured programmers.

constantcrying
0 replies
4h7m

The curse of technology is that it is neither good nor bad. Only in the way it is used t becomes one or the other.

I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.

That is just ridiculous. Modern neural networks are obviously an extremely useful tool.

Ekaros
0 replies
2h20m

I would wish lot more programmers refuse to work with surveillance and add tech... But nearly every site has that stuff on them... Goes to tell what are the principles of profession or in general...

ChrisMarshallNY
41 replies
6h27m

> McDonald became a fierce advocate of ethical decision-making

My hero, but also Don Quixote. I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig), especially in this crowd.

I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values. They had many other faults, but deficient institutional Integrity was not one of them.

Aurornis
20 replies
5h39m

I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority (basically, people believe that I'm a stuck-up prig),

This doesn’t match my experience at all. In my experience, the average person I’ve worked with also believes in personality integrity and is guided by a sense of ethics. One company I worked for started doing something clearly unethical, albeit legal, and the resulting backlash and exodus of engineers (including me) was a nice confirmation that most people I work with won’t tolerate unethical companies.

I have worked with people who take the idea of ethics to such an unreasonable extreme that they develop an ability to find fault with nearly everything. They come up with ways to rationalize their personal preferences as being the only ethical option, and they start finding ways to claim things they don’t like violate their personal integrity. One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics.

If you find yourself being a “hated minority” or people thinking you’re a “stuck up pig” for having basic ethics, you’re keeping some strange company. I’d get out of there as soon as possible.

ChrisMarshallNY
9 replies
5h8m

> keeping some strange company

Actually, that's this community. I do understand. Money is the only metric that matters, here, as it's really an entrepreneur forum. Everyone wants to be rich, and they aren't particularly tolerant of anything that might interfere with that.

But I'm not going anywhere. It's actually fun, here. I learn new stuff, all the time.

layer8
5 replies
4h17m

HN is not really a community.

justin_oaks
3 replies
2h38m

Just like in-person communities, you'll have general consensus on some ideas and fierce disagreement in others. You'll have people who are kind and those who are hateful.

You can identify that there may be a trend within a community without declaring that everyone in the community thinks the exact same way. And you could also be wrong about that trend because the majority is silent on the issue and you bump up against the vocal minority.

Perhaps you can elaborate on what a community is, and how HN differs from one.

layer8
2 replies
1h30m

The topical interests, general characteristics, experiences and opinions of HN members are too diverse to qualify as a community, IMO. There may be subsets that could qualify as a community, and if you only look at certain kinds/topics of submissions it might feel like one, but they are mixed within a larger heterogeneous crowd here.

justin_oaks
0 replies
34m

Thanks, that clarifies a lot.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
24m

I feel that a community can def be heterogenous AF. I participate in exactly that type of (IRL) community, and it is worldwide.

It does require some common focus, and common agreement that the community is important.

I do believe that we have those, here. The "common focus" may not be immediately apparent, but I think everyone here shares a desire to be involved in technology; which can mean a few things, but I'll lay odds that we could find a definition that everyone could agree on.

It is possible. I guarantee it.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
4h4m

I believe that it is. In my opinion and experience, any group of humans, interacting, on a regular basis, in a common venue, becomes a community.

I guess that it is a matter of definition.

I treat it as if it were a community, and that I am a member of that community, with rights and Responsibilities, thereof.

I know that lots of folks like to treat Internet (and, in some cases, IRL) communities as public toilets, but I'm not one of them. I feel that it is a privilege to hang out here, and don't want to piss in the punch bowl, so I'm rather careful about my interactions here.

I do find it a bit distressing, to see folks behaving like trolls, here. A lot of pretty heavy-duty folks participate on HN, but I guess the casual nature of the interactions, encourages folks to lose touch with that.

I think that it is really cool, that I could post a comment, and have an OG respond. I suspect that won't happen, too often, if I'm screeching and flinging poo.

ben_w
1 replies
2h12m

Money is the only metric that matters, here, as it's really an entrepreneur forum. Everyone wants to be rich

This place is surprisingly mixed in that regard given its origin; a significant number of comments I see about Apple, about OpenAI, about Paul Graham, are essentially anti-capitalist.

The vibe I get seems predominately hacker-vibe rather than entrepreneur-vibe.

That said, I'm also well aware of the "orange site bad" meme, so this vibe I get may be biased by which links' I find interesting enough to look at the discussions of.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
2h5m

Yeah, it was a snarky comment, and not my proudest moment, but it does apply to a significant number of folks. I tend to enjoy the contributions from folks that don't have that priority.

The demoralizing part, is folks that are getting screwed by The Big Dogs, and totally reflect the behavior; even though TBD think of them as "subhuman."

krisoft
0 replies
3h34m

Money is the only metric that matters, here

Says who? Did I agree to that when I subscribed?

Everyone wants to be rich,

Everyone? Like me too? Tell me more about that.

You in an earlier comment said that people believe that you are "a stuck-up prig". Are you sure it is due to your moral stance, and not because you are judgemental, and abrasive about it?

Perhaps if you would be less set in your mind about how you think everyone is you wouldn't come through as "a stuck-up prig". Maybe we would even find common grounds between us.

tedivm
6 replies
5h33m

I've left two companies over ethical concerns, but it's not as easy for most people implied here. Losing income can be challenging, especially if the industry is in a downturn.

justin_oaks
3 replies
2h30m

Out of curiosity, did you leave those companies because the company's core business was unethical (or veered that direction over time), because leadership was generally unethical, or because specific incidents that forced your hand?

At a previous job I saw unethical choices made by my boss, but the company as a whole wasn't doing anything wrong. One of my coworkers was asked to do something unethical and he refused, but he wasn't punished and wasn't forced to choose between his ethics and the job.

tedivm
2 replies
2h13m

Every time I had to leave for ethical reasons it was a leadership thing, mostly relating to how they treated other employees.

For instance, I joined a company that advertised itself as being fairly ethical (they even had a "no selling to military" type policy). However, after joining it was apparent that this wasn't the case. They really pushed transparent salaries, but then paid me way more than anyone else. There was a lot of sexism as well: despite one of my colleagues being just as skilled as I am, this colleague was given all the crap work because leadership didn't think they were as capable as I was. There was a lot of other stuff as well, but that's the big summary. I left after nine months.

The other company was similar, but it wasn't nearly as obvious at first. Over time it became very apparent that the founders cared more about boosting their own perception in the industry than they did the actual startup, and they also allowed the women in the company to be treated poorly. This company doesn't exist anymore.

I should mention that these were all startups I worked at, and I was always fairly highly positioned in the company. This meant I generally reported directly to the founders themselves. If it was something like a middle management issue I'd have tried to escalate it up to resolve it before just leaving, but if that doesn't work I'm financially stable enough to just leave.

justin_oaks
1 replies
52m

Thanks for taking the time to respond to me.

In startups like that, company culture and the founders' behavior is nearly one-in-the-same.

That's sad you had to deal with that kind of stuff. Even in the bad jobs I've had, the bad bosses treated the employees equally poorly.

tedivm
0 replies
20m

Well it's weird for me, because I was one of the people being treated better (I'm a guy). I just don't want to work with assholes, so when I see people being assholes to other people and leadership doesn't take it seriously then I leave.

Aurornis
1 replies
5h20m

Generally when people talk about leaving a company, they mean to go to another company.

I don’t think most people expect you to quit on the spot and walk straight into unemployment.

datameta
0 replies
4h37m

Sometimes the alternative to unemployment is far less attractive (exuberant burnout or total time sink preventing a meaningful job search).

LikelyABurner
1 replies
4h52m

One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics.

Speaking as a "security person", I passionately despise people like this because they make my life so much more difficult by poisoning the well. There are times in security where you need to drop the hammer, but it's precisely because of these situations that you need to build up the overall good will with your team of working with them. When you tell your team "this needs to be done immediately, and it's blocking", you need to have built up enough trust that they realize you're not throwing yet another TPS report at them, this time it's actually serious, and they do it immediately, as opposed to fighting/escalating.

And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
4h49m

> And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.

That's an interesting read of what I posted.

Glad to have been of service!

pyrale
0 replies
4h58m

In my experience, the average person I’ve worked with also believes in personality integrity and is guided by a sense of ethics.

Individual aspirations are not enough, if your org doesn't shape itself in a way to prevent bad outcomes, bad outcomes will happen.

optimalsolver
9 replies
6h10m

I'm a huge believer in Personal Integrity and Ethics, but I am painfully aware that this makes me a fairly hated minority

This is like when you tell an interviewer your great flaw is being too much of a perfectionist.

ChrisMarshallNY
6 replies
6h3m

…and… here we go…

I have no idea why the tech industry is such a moral cesspool.

sneak
3 replies
5h55m

All industries that involve huge amounts of money are moral cesspools. Tech are saints compared to the “defense” industry, or healthcare.

Sakos
1 replies
5h49m

Or anything in manufacturing or food/beverage (see Nestle and water rights) production. I think most of tech has it pretty good. Tech has the potential for incredible amounts of bad, but this is limited to the handful that dominate social media (see Facebook and the civil war in Ethiopia) or, I don't know, the ones selling surveillance software to governments and law enforcement.

Kim_Bruning
0 replies
5h30m

I thought ICT was terrible, so I decided I'd try the industrial side of things.

Ok, on the one hand, getting to play with cool robots, and eg using an actual forklift for debugging? Absolutely priceless, wouldn't trade it for the world.

But the ethical side of things? There's definitely ethics, don't get me wrong. Especially on the hardware side - necessary for safety after all. But the way software is sold and treated is ... different.

pwndByDeath
0 replies
5h7m

If you get to see some of the details, defense (US) is expensive but there is very little profit compared to other industry. There is epic amount of inefficiencies which is where all that cost is eaten.

tekla
0 replies
3h21m

Easy money and generally low education

beezlewax
0 replies
5h56m

It isn't though it's not really even one industry. It's used by every industry and some of that is a cesspool and some solutions/products are purely tech based cessools.

mwigdahl
0 replies
5h27m

My response when I'm told that in an interview is to ask specifically how that trait has caused problems for them. Quickly separates someone who's actually put thought into it from someone who is just trying to skate by.

justin_oaks
0 replies
2h25m

That sounds funny, but being a perfectionist IS actually a problem. You'll often waste time and effort making something perfect when "good enough" is all that's required.

ModernMech
8 replies
6h23m

If the world had more stuck up prigs, billion dollar corporations wouldn’t be using customers to beta test their lethal robots on public streets.

Here’s to prigs!

sebzim4500
6 replies
6h0m

And the million people being killed by human drivers every year? I guess they are a worthy sacrifice for idealogical purity.

woodson
2 replies
5h26m

The human driver is liable, the machine is not (or not in the same sense).

sebzim4500
0 replies
4h49m

"I can tolerate a million people dying, but I draw the line at one person dying without a clear person to sue."

pwndByDeath
0 replies
5h10m

And we all know that liability makes accidents less fatal after the fact ;)

noelherrick
0 replies
28m

Self-driving cars are a solution to a problem we already fixed a hundred years ago: we fixed transit with trains.

PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have bad actors that don't maintain their rail and underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health, or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is available today without having to invent new lidar sensors or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.

VHRanger
0 replies
5h46m

They're a sacrifice at the altar of biased decision making.

I think Tesla is somewhat reckless with self driving, but we all need to agree humans aren't much better and don't generate any controversy.

ModernMech
0 replies
50m

I’m not saying they should, but that there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things.

The right way asks for community buy in, follows safety procedures, is transparent and forthcoming about failures, is honest about capabilities and limitations.

The wrong way says “I can do what I want, I’m not asking permission, if you don’t like it sue me” The wrong way throws the safety playbook out the window and puts untrained operators in charge of untested deadly machines. The wrong way doesn’t ask for community input, obfuscates and dissembles when challenged, is capricious, vindictive, and ultimately (this is the most crucial part) not effective compared to the right way of doing things.

Given a choice between the safe thing to do and the thing that will please Musk, Tesla will always choose the latter.

LikelyABurner
0 replies
4h43m

"I'm sorry ModernMech, but you're in violation of our CoC with your overly negative and toxic tone. We're going to go ahead, close your issue, and merge the PR to add Torment Nexus integration."

This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.

pyrale
0 replies
5h0m

I was fortunate to find an employer that also believed in these values.

Same here, it's not paying well, but it feels refreshing to know that babies won't get thrown into mixers if you stop thinking for 10 minutes.

steveBK123
25 replies
5h49m

Exactly the concept why you don't want to let whatever dashboards/alerts/etc you maintain on your systems have a "normal amount of reds/fails/spurious texts".

At some point you become immune.

It's a lot harder to notice theres 4 red lights today than the usual 2-3 vs noticing 1 when there are normally exactly 0.

OutOfHere
16 replies
5h33m

Yes. The causative issue is the way in which projects are managed. Employees have no ownership of the project. If employees had ownership over which changes they think are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts back to zero before they take on new features or a new project. There are some obstacles:

1. Employees not having a say in which issues to work on. This pretty much leads to the death of a project in the medium term due to near-total disregard of maintenance issues and alerts.

2. Big-team ownership of a project. When everyone is in charge, no one is. This is why I advocate for a team size of exactly two for each corporate project.

3. Employees being unreasonably pressured for time. Perhaps the right framing for employees to think about it is: "If it were their own business or product, how would they do it?" This framing, combined with the backlog, should automatically help avoid spending more time than is necessary on an issue.

whodidntante
10 replies
4h53m

Not making an ethical/moral judgement here, just a practical one - is there any reason to believe that giving employees ownership of the projects will be any better than having "management" own it if all factors were truly considered ?

If every decision an employee made on features/issues/quality/time was accompanied by how much their pay was affected, would the outcomes really be better ?

The team could decide to fix all bugs before taking on a new feature, or that the 2 month allotment to a feature should really be three months to do it "right" without having to work nights/weekends, would the team really decide to do that if their paycheck was reduced by 10%, or delayed for that extra month for those new features were delivered ?

If all factors were included in the employee decision process, including the real world effect of revenue/profit on individual compensation from those decisions, it is not clear to me that employees would make any "better" decisions.

I would think that employees could be even more "short sighted" than senior management, as senior management likely has more at stake in terms of company reputation/equity/career than an employee who can change jobs easier, and an employee might choose not to "get those alerts to zero" if it meant they would have more immediate cash in their pocket.

And how would disagreements between team members be worked out if some were willing to forgo compensation to "do it right', and others wanted to cut even more corners ?

Truly having ownership means you have also financial risk.

nostrademons
5 replies
4h23m

Been all of an engineer, a manager, and a founder/CEO, and I enjoy analyzing organizational dysfunction.

The difference between an engineer and a manager's perspective usually comes down to their job description. An engineer is hired to get the engineering right; the reason the company pays them is for their ability to marry reality to organizational goals. The reason the company hires a manager is to set those organizational goals and ensure that everybody is marching toward them. This split is explicit for a reason: it ensures that when disagreements arise, they are explicitly negotiated. Most people are bad at making complex tradeoffs, and when they have to do so, their execution velocity suffers. Indeed, the job description for someone who is hired to make complex tradeoffs is called "executive", and they purposefully have to do no real work so that their decision-making functions only in terms of cost estimates that management bubbles up, not the personal pain that will result from those decisions.

Dysfunction arises from a few major sources:

1. There's a power imbalance between management and engineering. An engineer usually only has one project; if it fails, it often means their job, even if the outcome reality dictates is that it should fail. That gives them a strong incentive to send good news up the chain even if the project is going to fail. Good management gets around this by never penalizing bad news or good-faith project failure, but good management is actually really counterintuitive, because your natural reaction is to react to negative news with negative emotions.

2. Information is lost with every explicit communication up the chain. The information an engineer provides to management is a summary of the actual state of reality; if they passed along everything, it'd require that management become an engineer. Likewise recursively along the management chain. It's not always possible to predict which information is critical to an executive's decision, and so sometimes this gets lost as the management chain plays telephone.

3. Executives and policy-makers, by definition, are the least reality-informed people in the system, but they have the final say on all the decisions. They naturally tend to overweight the things that they are informed on, like "Will we lose the contract?" or "Will we miss earnings this quarter?"

All that said, the fact that most companies have a corporate hierarchy and they largely outcompete employee-owned or founder-owned cooperatives in the marketplace tends to suggest that even with the pitfalls, this is a more efficient system. The velocity penalty from having to both make the complex decisions and execute on them outweighs all the information loss. I experienced this with my startup: the failure mode was that I'd emotionally second-guess my executive decisions, which meant that I executed slowly on them, which meant that I didn't get enough iterations or enough feedback from the market to find product/market fit. This is also why startups that do succeed tend to be ones where the idea is obvious (to the founder at least, but not necessarily to the general public). They don't need to spend much time on complex positioning decisions, and can spend that time executing, and then eventually grow the company within the niche they know well.

kmacdough
2 replies
4h5m

All that said, the fact that most companies have a corporate hierarchy and they largely outcompete employee-owned or founder-owned cooperatives in the marketplace tends to suggest that even with the pitfalls, this is a more efficient system.

This conclusion seems nonsensical. The assumption that what's popular in thearket is popular because it's effective has only limited basis in reality. Heirarchical structures appear because power is naturally consolidating and most people have an extreme unwillingness to release power even when presented with evidence that it would improve their quality of life. It is true that employee owned companies are less effective at extracting wealth from the economy, but in my experience working for both traditional and employee owned companies, the reason is employees care more deeply about the cause. They tend to be much more efficient at providing value to the customer and paying employees better. The only people who lose out are the executives themselves which is why employee owned companies only exist when run by leaders with passion for creating value over collecting money. And that's just a rare breed.

nostrademons
1 replies
3h43m

You've touched on the reason why hierarchical corporations outcompete employee-owned-cooperatives:

Hierarchical structures appear because power is naturally consolidating and most people have an extreme unwillingness to release power even when presented with evidence that it would improve their quality of life.

Yes, and that is a fact of human nature. Moreover, many people are happy to work in a power structure if it means that they get more money to have more power over their own life than they otherwise would. The employees are all consenting actors here too: they have the option of quitting and going to an employee-owned cooperative, but most do not, because they make a lot more money in the corporate giant. (If they did all go to the employee-owned cooperative, it would drive down wages even further, since there is a finite amount of dollars coming into their market but that would be split across more employees.)

Remember the yardstick here. Capitalism optimizes for quantity of dollars transacted. The only quality that counts is the baseline quality needed to make the transaction happen. It's probably true that people who care about the cause deliver better service - but most customers don't care enough about the service or the cause for this to translate into more dollars.

As an employee and customer, you're also free to set your own value system. And most people are happier in work that is mission- & values-aligned; my wife has certainly made that tradeoff, and at various times in my life, I have too. But there's a financial penalty for it, because lots of people want to work in places that are mission-aligned but there's only a limited amount of dollars flowing into that work, so competition for those positions drives down wages.

chimpanzee
0 replies
3h28m

most customers don't care enough about the service or the cause for this to translate into more dollars.

This is an important point as it reinforces the hierarchical structure. In an economy composed of these hierarchies, a customer is often themselves buying in service of another hierarchy and will not themselves be the end user. This reduces the demand for mission-focused work in the economy, instead reinforcing the predominance of profit-focused hierarchies.

rawgabbit
0 replies
3h51m

There is a Chinese saying you can conquer a kingdom on horseback but you cannot rule it on horseback. What that means is, yes, entrepreneurial velocity and time to market predominate in startups. But if they don’t implement governance and due process, they will eventually lose what market share they gained. Left uncontrolled, internal factions and self serving behavior destroys all organisations from within.

chimpanzee
0 replies
3h51m

This is a wonderful summary, very informative. Thank you. Is there a book or other source you’d recommend on the subject of organizational roles and/or dysfunction?…ideally one written with similar clarity.

One thing stood out to me:

You note that executives are the least reality-informed and are insulated from having their decisions affect personal pain. While somewhat obvious, it also seems counterintuitive in light of the usual pay structure of these hierarchies and the usual rationale for that structure. That is, they are nearly always the highest paid actors and usually have the most to gain from company success; the reasoning often being that the pay compensates for the stress of, criticality of, or experience required for their roles. Judgments aside and ignoring the role of power (which is not at all insignificant, as already mentioned by a sibling commenter), how would you account for this?

chuckadams
1 replies
4h9m

Not making an ethical/moral judgement here, just a practical one - is there any reason to believe that giving employees ownership of the projects will be any better than having "management" own it if all factors were truly considered ?

It's not either-or, the ownership is shared. As responsibility goes, the buck ultimately stops with management, but when the people in the trenches can make more of their own decisions, they'll take more pride in their work and invest accordingly in quality. Of course some managers become entirely superfluous when a team self-manages to this extent, and will fight tooth and nail to defend their fiefdom. Can't blame them, it's perfectly rational to try to keep one's job.

As for tying the quality to pay in such an immediate way, I guess it depends on who's measuring what and why. Something about metrics becoming meaningless when made into a target, I believe it's called Cunningham's Law. I have big doubts as to whether it could work effectively in any large corpo shop, they're just not built for bottom-up organization.

rawgabbit
0 replies
4h37m

What I see is a movement where line employees have a say on who is retained at the director and VP level.

The CEO reports to the board. But his immediate and second tier reports are also judged by the employees. The thought is that will give them pause before they embark on their next my way or the highway decision making. The most egregious directors who push out line employees in favor of their cronies will be fired under this evaluation.

OutOfHere
0 replies
4h30m

is there any reason to believe that giving employees ownership of the projects will be any better than having "management" own it

Non-technical management's skill level is almost always overrated. They're almost never qualified for it. Ultimately it still is management's decision, and always will be. If however management believes that employees are incapable of serving users, then it's management's fault for assigning mismatched employees.

how much their pay was affected

Bringing pay into this discussion is a nonsensical distraction. If an employer misses two consecutive paychecks by even 1%, that's enough reason to stop showing up for work, and potentially to sue for severance+damages, and also claim unemployment wages. There is no room for any variation here.

Truly having ownership

It should be obvious that ownership here refers to the ownership of the technical direction, not literal ownership in the way I own a backpack that I bring to work. If true financial ownership existed, the employee would be receiving substantial equity with a real tradable market value, with the risk of losing some of this equity if they were to lose their job.

how would disagreements between team members be worked out

As noted, there would be just two employees per project, and this ought to minimize disagreements. If disagreements still exist, this is where management can assist with direction. There should always remain room for conducting diverse experiments without having to worry about which outcomes get discarded and which get used.

---

In summary, if the suggested approach is not working, it's probably because there is significant unavoidable technical debt or the employees are mismatched to the task.

CSMastermind
2 replies
3h37m

If employees had ownership over which changes they think are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts back to zero before they take on new features or a new project.

You say this but as someone who's run a large platform organization that hasn't been my experience. Sure some employees, maybe you, care about things like bringing alerts back to zero but a large number are indifferent and a small number are outright dismissive.

This is informed not just by individual personality but also by culture.

Not too long ago I pointed out a bug in someone's code who I was reviewing and instead of fixing it they said, "Oh okay, I'll look out for bugs like that when I write code in the future" then proceeded to merge and deploy their unchanged code. And in that case I'm their manager not a peer or someone from another team, they have all the incentive in the world to stop and fix the problem. It was purely a cultural thing where in their mind their code worked 'good enough' so why not deploy it and just take the feedback as something that could be done better next time.

OutOfHere
1 replies
3h33m

With regard to alerts, I have written software that daytrades stocks, making a lot of trades over a lot of stocks. Let me assure you that not a single alert goes ignored, and if someone said it's okay to ignore said alerts, or to have persistent alerts that require no action, they would be losing money because in time, they will inevitably ignore a critical error. I stand by my claim that it's what sets apart good employees from those that don't care if the business lives or dies. I think a role of management is to ensure that employees understand the potential consequences to the business of the code being wrong.

steveBK123
0 replies
57m

Yes, there was a recent story about (yet another) Citi "fat finger" trade. The headlines mentioned things like "the trader ignored 700 error messages to put in the trade", but listening to a podcast about it.. its more like awful systems that are always half broken is what ultimately lead to it.

The real punchline was this - the trader confused a field for entering shares quantity for notional quantity, but due to some European markets being closed, the system had a weird fallback logic that it sets the value of shares to $1, so the confirmation back to the trader was.. the correct number of dollars he expected.

So awful system designs lead to useless and numerous alerts, false confirmations, and ultimately huge errors.

lencastre
0 replies
4h5m

And groupthink

josefx
0 replies
1h54m

If employees had ownership over which changes they think are best, a good employee would act on bringing the alerts back to zero before they take on new features or a new project

That requires that you have good employees, which can be as rare as good management.

ChrisMarshallNY
5 replies
3h45m

I like to program with -wall.

Doesn't win me fans, but I sleep well.

drited
4 replies
3h37m

Could you please expand on what that is?

diab0lic
0 replies
3h34m

It’s a CLI flag to the compiler that enables all warnings.

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
3h35m

It's a C/C++ compiler flag, saying all warnings on.

Since I do Swift, these days, in Xcode, I use project settings, instead.

I also like to treat warnings as errors.

Forces me to be circumspect.

simpaticoder
1 replies
4h35m

The more pernicious form of this, in my experience, are ignored compiler/linter/test warnings. Many codebases have a tremendous number of these warnings, devs learn to ignore them, and this important signal of code quality is effectively lost.

eschneider
0 replies
2h31m

It's almost always worth spending the time to either fix all warnings or, after determining it's a false positive, suppressing it with a #pragma.

Once things are relatively clean, it's easy to see if new code/changes trip a warning. Often unexpected warnings are a sign of subtle bugs or at least use of undefined behaviors. Sorting those out when they come up is a heck of a lot easier than tracing a bug report back to the same warming.

andrei-akopian
6 replies
5h44m

I have an unclarity with this situation.

How much of him being a hero is a coincidence? Did he refuse to sign the previous launches? Did NASA have reasons to believe that the launch could be successful? How much of a role does probability play here. I mean if someone literally tells you something isn't safe, especially the person who made it, you can't tell him it will work. There is somekind of bias here.

nraynaud
1 replies
5h29m

The article is a bit weird, he refused to sign a form inside a private company. But the private company presented a signed form to NASA (signed by higher-up’s).

So NASA probably didn’t look closely into the engineering, in particular when launch is tomorrow.

kop316
0 replies
5h5m

I got to hear him recount the story, and yeah the article is weird.

The form he talked about was one that, if not signed, would mean that the launch would not happen. I can't remember if it was an internal form or not, but it doesn't really matter in that context.

Since NASA needed that form signed, he was under intense pressure to actually sign it both by NASA and his company. Someone else from the company not on site signed it.

vntok
0 replies
5h32m

Something can work and not be safe at the same time.

gwbas1c
0 replies
4h0m

The challenger disaster was a case study when I was in school: The important lesson is about human psychology, and why it's important to not speak up when something is dangerous.

Basically, the "powers that be" wanted the launch and overruled the concerns of the engineers. They forced the launch against better judgement.

(Think of the, "Oh, that nerd is always complaining, I'm going to ignore them because they aren't important," attitude.)

constantcrying
0 replies
4h11m

To be completely honest I think you are somewhat naive. I have seen organizations push through decisions, which were obviously bad, in fact nearly everyone on the lower levels agreed that the goal of the decision was unachievable. But of course that didn't stop the organization.

I mean if someone literally tells you something isn't safe, especially the person who made it, you can't tell him it will work.

You literally can.

_kb
0 replies
5h17m

Of course there's bias. If he had rubber-stamped it there would be no story to tell.

His decision would have been questioned after the fact, he would defer to information from levels below, and this would recurse until responsibility had dissipated beyond and any personal attribution. The same pattern happens in every org, every day (to decisions of mostly lesser affect).

The key point—at least from my read—were the follow up actions to highlight where information was intentionally ignored, prevent that dispersion of responsibility, and ensure it didn't happen again.

mihaic
5 replies
4h40m

Rest in peace Allan.

As much as his action were admirable, the most shocking thing about that story was how the politicians rallied to protect him after his demotion, forcing his company to keep and actually promote him. That's why I get both sad and angry when I hear the new mantra of "Government can't do anything, the markets have to regulate that problem."

cptskippy
3 replies
4h9m

the new mantra of "Government can't do anything, the markets have to regulate that problem."

That's been the conservative line for 35+ years. How is that new?

ToucanLoucan
2 replies
3h53m

I think more like 70 years at this point. It's been SOP for the conservatives to get elected to govern, make government worse at every turn while enriching themselves and their friends, and then turning around to the public and being like "look how badly this works, clearly we need to cut taxes since it isn't working" and rinse and repeat until every institution in the world is borderline non-functioning.

kbolino
1 replies
1h43m

It was Jimmy Carter and not Ronald Reagan who scrapped the civil service competency exams. Government getting worse has been a two-party affair for quite some time. No one has any incentive to fix it, and the system is so vast, so complex, and so self-serving that no one even has the power to fix it (as things stand).

ToucanLoucan
0 replies
9m

The Democrats in America are highly conservative. Not as conservative as the Republicans, but still very conservative. We don't have a left and a right here, we have a hard right and a center right.

capitainenemo
0 replies
4h26m

I mean... his company was sitting on a lucrative government contract for an agency that was working hard to cover up a failure. It's fortunate that in this case distribution of power (and the shocking nature of the failure) ensured that the right thing happened, but I see a corporate and government management colluding to maintain their positions.

Distribution of power is definitely important though, whether public or private. People concerned about government abuse is due to the fact that due to its nature, government power structures are more often centralised and without competitors by definition. There are monitors but they are often parts of the same system.

hydrogen7800
4 replies
5h3m

Allan McDonald is a new name for me. Thanks for posting this. See also other engineers who objected to the launch, like Bob Ebeling [0], who suffered with overwhelming guilt nearly until his death in 2016, and Roger Boisjoly [1], who never worked again as an engineer after Challenger.

[0] https://archive.ph/kGMYG

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly

sjm-lbm
2 replies
3h31m

I hadn't heard of McDonald either, but there's a recent book (https://www.amazon.com/Challenger-Story-Heroism-Disaster-Spa...) that covers his contribution well.

(TBH I'm reading this book right now - probably 2/3 the way through or so - and it's kind of weird to see something like this randomly pop up on HN today.)

aybs
1 replies
3h1m

I just listened to the audio book on spotify, free for premium members, and I'm wondering if that's why I'm seeing so much about the Challenger disaster lately. Well worth a listen, and spends a great deal of time on setup for these key individuals who tried so hard to avert this disaster.

autoexec
0 replies
2h0m

Boeing's Starliner problems? This article was probably brought on by the (then) recent passing of Allan McDonald

cushychicken
0 replies
3h28m

Boisjoly was Macdonald's peer at Thiokol. Ebeling (I think) was either his direct manager or his division director.

Boisjoly quit Thiokol after the booster incident. Macdonald stayed, and was harassed terribly by management. He took Thiokol to court at least once (possibly twice) on wrongful discrimination / termination / whistleblower clauses, and won.

EncomLab
4 replies
6h38m

"Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" is a fascinating (if sometimes tedious) book that should be at the top of any reading list for those interested in the Challenger disaster.

For me one of the more interesting side-bar discussions are those around deciding to use horizontal testing of the boosters despite that not being an operational configuration. This resulted in flexing of the joints that was not at all similar to the flight configuration and hindered identification of the weaknesses of the original "field joint" design.

nordsieck
3 replies
5h50m

Interestingly, we're still testing SLS SRBs[1] horizontally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wqAbVqZyg

---

1. In case anyone doesn't know, they use the actual recovered Shuttle casings on SLS, but use an extra "middle" section to make it 5 sections in length instead of the Shuttle's 4 sections. In the future they'll move to "BOLE" boosters which won't use previously flown Shuttle parts.

nraynaud
1 replies
5h26m

I think the booster was redesigned after the accident, I guess/hope the opportunity was seized to make a design that would be less sensitive to orientation.

nordsieck
0 replies
5h10m

I think the booster was redesigned after the accident

That is correct. I believe they added:

* An extra seal

* A "J-Leg" carved into the insulation[1] that acts as a sort of pre-seal

I guess/hope the opportunity was seized to make a design that would be less sensitive to orientation.

I guess, we'll see how things shake out.

---

1. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/12/artemis-1-schedule-u...

bityard
0 replies
4h20m

Are you saying that they are tested horizontally or that they are ONLY tested horizontally? (Very different things.)

shswkna
3 replies
6h39m

This is an ever recurring theme in the human condition.

McDonald’s loyalty was not beholden to his bosses, or what society or the country wanted at that moment in time. He knew a certain truth, based on facts he was aware of, and stuck by them.

This is so refreshing in todays world, where almost everyone seems to be a slave to some kind of groupthink, at least in public.

illusive4080
1 replies
6h25m

In corporate world, everything must be tame and beige. Conflict or differences of opinion are avoided to focus on the areas where everyone agrees. It’s exhausting sometimes to try and change methodologies. Introducing new technology can cause so much headache that many passive leaders just shun it in favor of keeping the peace.

subpixel
0 replies
6h17m

If my org is any measure of the truth, passive leadership isn’t a thing - despite the prevalence of passive leaders.

freeopinion
0 replies
2h11m

We all celebrate a hero who stands for what they believe or know to be right. When they stand alone we admire their steadfastness while triumphant music plays in the background.

In real life we can't stand these people. They are always being difficult. They make mountains out of every molehill. They can never be reasonable even when everyone else on the team disagrees with them.

Please take a moment to reflect on how you treat inconvenient people in real life.

wildzzz
1 replies
3h19m

Why would NASA use their real names if they hired some random group of people to play astronauts that died in Challenger? Or, why would NASA not give false identities to their astronauts that faked dying in Challenger and instead gave them high profile jobs that would have required real resumes? And what is the point of blowing up a space shuttle? If NASA is faking space launches all the time, it seems easier just to declare each one a success than to manufacture a tragedy and congressional investigation. This guy is an absolute kook and that "documentary" is complete nonsense.

robxorb
0 replies
2h51m

My guess is because when you make it so stupidly obvious it's unbelievable, people will respond exactly like you have, ask exactly your questions, and end up convinced it's not true. Ad hominem doesn't help (as much as I may agree!).

The fact remains that these people the guy found look extremely similar, but correctly aged and have the same names. If it's not indicative of some bizarre conspiracy, it's still extremely weird a coincidence.

I'd have hoped someone could calculate some odds based on names and looks or something and make it make sense.

datameta
0 replies
4h50m

Well, according to Occam's Razor...

d--b
3 replies
6h13m

Ok, cool, but what the hell happened? They had a guy in charge of signing-off the launch, he didn't sign off because of 3 problems he identified, and they still launched. wtf?

ohmyiv
0 replies
6h1m

From the article: (During the hearing)

The NASA official simply said that Thiokol had some concerns but approved the launch. He neglected to say that the approval came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from NASA officials, overruled the engineers.
lancesells
0 replies
5h53m

This sounds like an issue that's still around.

coldcode
0 replies
5h56m

The engineers were overruled by the executives because NASA was pissed at the company for messing up their plans.

7e
3 replies
3h56m

I don't relish all of the issues which will eventually surface with SpaceX's Starship, which makes Space Shuttle development look like a paragon of high quality development practices. Starship is built in a metaphorical barn with a "fuck around and find out" attitude.

roelschroeven
0 replies
2h20m

I don't think that's quite the case. SpaceX's method is more "release early, release often", and find (and solve!) issues early on. Traditional space companies on the other hand use a very rigid waterfall method.

SpaceX's method is not "fuck around and find out". It's design, find out, iterate. From what I can tell from the outside, it seems very reasonable.

kbolino
0 replies
1h37m

The early manned space programs at USAF/NASA were a lot more cavalier than the shuttle program.

fhub
0 replies
1h44m

That metaphorical barn is run by Kathy Lueders. Look her up and it might soften your thinking a bit.

robg
2 replies
6h5m

What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often stress his laws of the seven R's," Maier says. "It was always, always do the right thing for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life.

treprinum
0 replies
4h39m

Even following all that could have led to Challenger exploding (stochastic process with non-zero probability of a terminal failure), and leaving everyone with "What did we do wrong?" without any answer and full of regrets for the rest of their lives.

jrexilius
0 replies
5h53m

That is the key line from the whole piece.

neilv
2 replies
4h37m

Allan McDonald leaves behind his wife, Linda, and four children — and a legacy of doing the right things at the right times with the right people.

It sounds like the most noteworthy part of his legacy is attempting to do the right thing, but with the wrong people.

I think this is meaningful to mention, because saying to do "the right things, at the right time, with the right people" is easy -- but harder is figuring out what that really means, and how do you achieve that state when you have incomplete control?

noisy_boy
1 replies
4h16m

He had incomplete control but did the right thing (to refuse to let the risk slide) at the right time (before the launch). You don't need to have full control to do this.

but harder is figuring out what that really means

I think it is quite clear except the part about "right people"; if the people around you are not right, I would guess it is even more important to do the right thing. Obviously this comes at at a (potentially great) cost which is why it is easier said than done and why his actions are so admirable.

neilv
0 replies
1h38m

"The right people" is difficult. Working with NASA would seem one of the better bets.

For startup founders, you can try to hire "the right people". (And share the equity appropriately.)

For job-seekers, when you're interviewing with them, you can ask yourself whether they're "the right people". (And don't get distracted by a Leetcode hazing, in what's supposed to be collegial information-sharing and -gathering by both parties.)

htrp
2 replies
6h8m

He neglected to say that the approval came only after Thiokol executives, under intense pressure from NASA officials, overruled the engineers.

Sounds kinda familiar?

djeastm
0 replies
4h30m

A story as old as time.

Chris2048
0 replies
5h54m

I wonder how the process even allows this. An approval from the executives of the company shouldn't be worth anything.

nandgate10
1 replies
5h58m

Now that OSS projects like a certain popular dynamic language have been taken over by corporations, criticism like security or performance issues are forbidden as well and punished.

(One corporation though seems to withdraw from that language due to the attitude of the project and its representatives.)

mablopoule
0 replies
3h54m

Honestly, you're either telling too much or too little.

Could tell what are the precise language / corporation / project, if you're comfortable with that of course?

zensnail
0 replies
5h39m

Iconoclasts like Robert are vital to get us to a stage one civ. May he rest in peace. Appreciate the post.

tejohnso
0 replies
3h13m

Morton Thiokol executives were not happy that McDonald spoke up, and they demoted him.

And then all of their government contracts should have been revoked.

smsm42
0 replies
1h32m

What is missing here for me is who were the anonymous "executives" that overruled Mcdonald (and others) and tried to punish him? Did they suffer any consequences for actions that cost lives and for the coverup?

rawgabbit
0 replies
6h33m

McDonald was my hero as a young engineering student. The miracle was that he was exonerated.

quacked
0 replies
30m

I'm late to the party, but I work as a NASA contractor and have just recently been reading "Truth, Lies, and O-Rings" by Mr. McDonald.

Something that I find really frustrating is that it seems that there's an international "caste" of honest engineers who are ready, and have been ready for centuries if not millenia, to pull the metaphorical trigger on advancing human society to the next level. International rail systems, replacing all electrical generation with nuclear, creating safe and well-inspected commercial airplanes, etc.

Blocking that "caste" from uniting with each other and coordinating these projects are the Old Guard; the "local area warlords", although these days they may have different titles than they would have a thousand years ago. These people do not speak a language of technical accuracy, but rather their primary guiding principles are personal loyalty, as was common in old honor societies. They introduce graft, violence, corruption, dishonesty, and personal asset capture into these projects and keep them from coming to fruition. They would not sacrifice their lifestyles in order to introduce technical excellence into the system they're charged with managing, but instead think more about their workload, their salary, their personal obligations to their other (often dishonest) friends, and their career tracks.

It wouldn't even occur to me to worry more about a promotion than than the technical merit of a machine or system I was engaged with. I would never lie about something myself a colleague of mine said or did. For those reasons I will never be particularly competitive with the people who do become VPs and executive managers.

How many different people around the world, and especially that are on HackerNews, are in my exact situation? With the right funding and leadership could all quit our stupid fucking jobs building adtech or joining customer databases together or generating glorified Excel spreadsheets and instead be the International Railway Corps, or the International Nuclear Corps. And yet since we can't generate the cashflow necessary to satisfy the Local Area Warlords that own all the tooling facilities and the markets and the land, it will never be.

globalnode
0 replies
4h44m

nowadays you have an unlucky accident if youre a whistleblower, lucky he wound up getting a promo for it (after being demoted).

cushychicken
0 replies
5h37m

I got to eat lunch with Allan Macdonald in college. I was an IEEE officer and we hosted him for a talk at Montana State, so I got to take him out for lunch before his talk.

Dude got a lunch beer without a second though. (My man!)

He then gave a talk that afternoon talking about interrupting a closed session of the Challenger commission to gainsay a Thiokol VP. The VP in question testified to Congress that he wasn't aware of any launch risks. Macdonald stood up, went to the aisle, and said something to the effect of "Mr. Yeager, that is not true - this man was informed of the risks multiple times before the launch. I was the one that told him." (He was addressing Chuck Yeager, btw. Yeah, that Chuck Yeager.)

No mean feat to have the stones to interrupt a congressional hearing stacked with America's aviation and space heavyweights.

breput
0 replies
2h46m

It's also worth noting how the o-ring story was made public. There is the famous testimony by Richard Feynman[0], but the secret was that astronaut/commissioner Sally Ride leaked the story to another commissioner, who then suggested it to Feynman over dinner[1].

Neither Ride nor Kutyna could risk exposing the information themselves, but no would could question or impeach Feynman.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raMmRKGkGD4

[1] https://lithub.com/how-legendary-physicist-richard-feynman-h...

alecco
0 replies
6h29m

(2021)

WhitneyLand
0 replies
4h11m

Which executive pressured the engineers, was there any accountability?

Anotheroneagain
0 replies
5h6m

It's sad to see the decline of civilization, and how far back basic principles were not understood, and turned into a cargo cult. The point why somebody had to sign something to approve it was exactly that he had the option to not sign it in case that there was a problem. But even then, it was seen as a job to be done, that you either do, or fail to do.