Item — HN Reader

As far as I can tell, the central thesis is that companies (maybe just tech companies) are screwed up. The sardonic tone though makes it almost entirely undigestable to me.

There's an emotional air of "the world is F'd and nobody sees it," that is independent of the central thesis, that makes it hard for me to take the anecdotes at face value. Which is too bad, because I'm sure there are a lot of grains of truth behind the author's experience.

Additionally, I have to observe that the author's experience doesn't align very well with mine. Certainly I've seen bad decisions, bad tech (but never a failure to use source control as he describes), some politics, intense personalities, but by and large I've found the vast majority of people to be acting in good faith, albeit sometimes creatures of habit and hard to win over before you build a track record.

4 comments

I think one of the main points is that things are f...ed up but there is no way to tell anybody who has the power to change that. I see that in my company a lot. A lot of processes are inefficient but there is nobody you can talk to about improvements. So people just get used to doing silly things.

>> A lot of processes are inefficient but there is nobody you can talk to about improvements.

Well, I don't think there's nobody you can talk to. Let's just take his first 3 examples, as a random sample:

1. Paragraph 2: A company institutes radical freedom, so half the people leave within the first year. -- I don't see exactly what his point is, I'm not convinced this is a problem, and I don't see him offering a solution, and who can't he talk to about it?

2. Paragraph 3: A company that has a crazy paranoia about leakers. -- Sounds messed up, but I'm like 90% sure he could say "I notice some coworkers are unclear about forwarding emails on things like health plans, which as I understand, aren't company secrets. Could we shoot out a general message clarifying which materials ARE and AREN'T protected to alleviate any confusion?"

3. Paragraph 4: There's a company where to managers hate each other too much to be in the same room. -- I'm not sure what his point is, should one of them be fired? If he earns the ear of their manager, he can certainly insinuate that such a personality conflicts leads to problems.

Care to explain the downvotes?

Did you make it down to the "solutions" part? One can quibble with style, but it wasn't just a parade of horribles.

He's more gesturing towards building high-performing engineering cultures, or at least avoiding building variations on the illustrative dysfunctional themes.

The post's title references an article on aircraft safety procedures or rather it becoming normal over time for a certain group to ignore those procedures.

I don't think the author is (necessarily) saying this is how everything is. He is just describing how a culture of X being broken can propagate.

Just putting this excerpt from the cited paper on "Normalization of Deviance" for people who skim the comments only (I would recommend reading the whole article, this one is for once worth it IMHO):

A catastrophic negligence case that the author participated in as an expert witness involved an anesthesiologist's turning off a ventilator at the request of a surgeon who wanted to take an x-ray of the patient's abdomen (Banja, 2005, pp. 87-101). The ventilator was to be off for only a few seconds, but the anesthesiologist forgot to turn it back on, or thought he turned it back on but had not. The patient was without oxygen for a long enough time to cause her to experience global anoxia, which plunged her into a vegetative state. She never recovered, was disconnected from artificial ventilation 9 days later, and then died 2 days after that. It was later discovered that the anesthesia alarms and monitoring equipment in the operating room had been deliberately programmed to a “suspend indefinite” mode such that the anesthesiologist was not alerted to the ventilator problem. Tragically, the very instrumentality that was in place to prevent such a horror was disabled, possibly because the operating room staff found the constant beeping irritating and annoying.

...

What these disasters typically reveal is that the factors accounting for them usually had “long incubation periods, typified by rule violations, discrepant events that accumulated unnoticed, and cultural beliefs about hazards that together prevented interventions that might have staved off harmful outcomes”. Furthermore, it is especially striking how multiple rule violations and lapses can coalesce so as to enable a disaster's occurrence.

I’ve always taken the tone to be “the world is as f’d as we choose to make it”. I’m an optimist?

“An optimist is someone who believes we live in the best possible world. A pessimist is someone who fears this is true.”

I forgot the source of that quote.

The Silver Stallion -- by James Branch Cabell

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label."