A coworker suggested that there is an engineering term that describes a decline in quality (in a product or process) to a point where there can never be a recovery to the initial state. Anyone know what the term might be?
Ask HN: What is the word?
1–6 of 6 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the word?
#2FUBAR is very casual (and probably inappropriate) acronym from the military that means what you are looking for.
Re: Ask HN: What is the word?
#3LOL - have heard that one before... not a bad match. I was hoping for one that might qualify in buzzword bingo like "irrecoverable declination." It would be nice to be able to capture the idea to encourage ongoing vigilance in quality (rather than simply "fixing it later").
Re: Ask HN: What is the word?
#4My favourite is "you can't polish a turd" though I don't think it really qualifies as an engineering term!
Re: Ask HN: What is the word?
#5LOL - have heard that one before... not a bad match. I was hoping for one that might qualify in buzzword bingo like "irrecoverable declination." It would be nice to be able to capture the idea to encourage ongoing vigilance in quality (rather than simply "fixing it later").
There is a pretty commonly used term in manufacturing for "ongoing vigilance in quality" which is the Japanese word kaizen. It means continual improvement (at least in American manufacturing companies, not sure about original Japanese).
Re: Ask HN: What is the word?
#6I use "incident pit" for this.
This is a concept from SCUBA diving, imagine a slope that starts off shallow on the left hand side of a graph and becomes exponentially steeper as you go right. The horizontal axis is what has just gone wrong. The vertical axis is how much trouble you're in.
So over at the left hand side of the graph, something major can go wrong (moving you quite far to the right) but it doesn't move you very far vertically, so you're OK. The further to right you get, the smaller the movement to the right it takes to increase your trouble by the same amount. At the point where the graph gets asymptotic, a tiny movement to the right - an otherwise trivial thing going a tiny bit wrong - is enough to push you off the scale (i.e. you're dead).
The trap is that you can't see yourself falling into the pit, because it appears early on that problems aren't having a significant effect. This leads to overconfidence. Then once you're in the pit, it becomes harder and harder to get back out again (i.e. you need a huge vertical movement for a small horizontal movement back to the left). An experienced diver is hypersensitive and this is why you will see people abandon a dive for a seemingly trivial matter - they've felt themselves at the top of an incident pit.