101–110 of 124 posts
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With high position came great responsibility. If the engineer instead of management were making those decision, we would blame correspondingly.
Are you under the impression that management contains 0 engineers and that engineers had nothing to do with the decisions made...?
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So the MBA's arent responsible for the people they manage? Or are the engineers rogue and answer to no one at Boeing?
The point is not that it's completely the other way around. It's that it's not black nor white, but rather gray. In other words, engineers also have responsibility, as well as management.
If engineers are doing unsatisfactory work, it's management's responsibility to recognise the problem and fix it - whether that means finding better engineers, or developing better systems and processes for motivation, direction, quality control and oversight, or simply communicating strategy and culture more clearly.
Of course here the subtext is that "tribal" engineers were just as responsible for Boeing's many recent failures as the C-suite were.
And that's a particularly toxic and dishonest view, because we know from records that engineers were desperately trying to fix the 737 Max issues, while senior management were desperately putting short-term profits ahead of long-term consequences - with fatal results.
There is no "also" here. The suggestion that there might be is a naked attempt to displace blame and rewrite history.
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Why should blame be tied to compensation? Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals. The first manager is ultimately going to be seen as more effective and will get larger bonuses and will be…
> Why should blame be tied to compensation? Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals. Maybe because when those goals involve cutting corners on safety and hundreds of people die as a result,…
Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure?
I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.
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> Why should blame be tied to compensation? Compensation tends to be tied to perceived impact. The perceived impact of a manager with 10 reports who are all focused and delivering individually is much higher than the impact of a manager with the same number of reports where half the team meets few of their goals. Maybe because when those goals involve cutting corners on safety and hundreds of people die as a result,…
Again, how is that the same as saying that blame should be tied to compensation? Separate out management for a moment. So an engineer who gets paid 50% more than another deserves 50% more blame for a failure? I thought HN was a place where people attempted to form good arguments based on fact, not one where people let emotion rule the day.
To entertain the naive pedantry for a second: first, I think a heck of a lot of people would tolerate that 50% scenario more than the status quo, and second, it's not exactly outrageous to suggest the impact you have on a design goes hand-in-hand with how much blame you deserve for it when it breaks (or how much praise you deserve for it when it works). Now, you yourself say compensation should also be tied to impact. Apply the transitive property. You might be surprised what you get.
But surely you realize you're making a strawman out of the points people are trying to make? It's not literally the "same thing", it's an approximation meant to get a point across, and it's based on the assumption that you apply some common sense instead of treating it like a mathematical proposition. Like the understanding that you literally can't fire 98.3% of one guy and 1.7% of another, so clearly everyone understands "blame" will get out of sync with compensation; that in itself is obviously not the literal point. And the understanding what people are clearly upset about is the fact that those who are given more responsibility and power over a product (which just so happens to go hand-in-hand with their pay) frequently appear to bear far less blame than those whom they manage and give directions to. Nitpicking on why it should be proportional to the guy's salary is literally missing the gigantic problem the other person is trying to point out.
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Having been through business school, the MBAs are much more likely to be complete numbnuts, an observation which is very strongly correlated with most of the CEOs and managers I have spent time with close-up
"boy, people who aren't me sure are stupid!" Finally someone on the internet comes through!
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Nowhere in the article has the author claimed that. :/
From the article: "Shift 2: From Rapid Iteration to Exploration" But rapid iteration is the most efficient means of exploration for many areas. Exploration is the reason many people use the "move fast and break things" rapid iteration strategy.
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Are you under the impression that management contains 0 engineers and that engineers had nothing to do with the decisions made...?
I'm under the impression that MBA culture has issues with taking responsibility for failure, and will always try to assign blame somewhere - anywhere - else.
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The problems that MBAs are trying to solve are not those at which your average engineer is particularly good. Also, these problems are usually ill defined and not easily testable. On top of that, to "deploy" your solution you need to show a schizophrenic amount of confidence for the amount of ambiguity and risk you plan to take, and you have to do it all in the form of a PowerPoint slide deck for people who are most…
> a schizophrenic amount of confidence What does that mean? "A lot"?
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Its crazy how tribalistic HN has become. The whole Boeing fiasco has produced SO MANY "gosh, all those MBAs are at fault. I assign 0 fault to the engineers!" and every. single. time. There is a problem relating to a management/engineering decision, blame from HN ALWAYS goes to "the MBA types" and very literally never to engineering. I guess I just don't understand what the point of this type of tribalism is? Feeling…
The problems that MBAs are trying to solve are not those at which your average engineer is particularly good. Also, these problems are usually ill defined and not easily testable. On top of that, to "deploy" your solution you need to show a schizophrenic amount of confidence for the amount of ambiguity and risk you plan to take, and you have to do it all in the form of a PowerPoint slide deck for people who are most…
I as an engineer like neither of those things. Research the market, create a product per spec, then write documents in markdown. The idea of business are not foreign to us, there are plenty of engineers who start business. And I think the balance is tipping over to the engineers.
In my opinion we don't need a dedicated decision making class. decision making is a skill that engineer can acquire - no need to involve people with no technical understanding into the equation.
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The problem is that the managers don't have accountability at the same level they are compensated . If you are compensated better than 90% of your workforce, then you should receive better than 90% of the blame every single time something goes wrong. You're that important, no?
That is so mistaken I’m not sure where to start. I agree there should be accountability, but to say it should be commensurate with compensation is absurd. What happens around here is the engineers are never to blame and it’s always management. Even when it’s specifically an engineering problem it’s the managers’ fault for not preventing the engineers from making a mistake.
Then you disagree with practically every military on the planet.
So, you're going to to have to provide at least a little bit of counterexample to support your position.
> Even when it’s specifically an engineering problem it’s the managers’ fault for not preventing the engineers from making a mistake.
There are VERY few times when engineering results in the failure of the project--Citicorp center, Tacoma Narrows, Therac-25, maybe I'll even give you Three Mile Island (the teletypewriter was producing bad data because it didn't have the capacity and got further behind as time went) ... I'm having to work hard after that but I'm sure I could come up with a few more. This is normally true because engineers almost always add a safety margin just in case something they can't account for goes wrong.
By contrast, most of our worst disasters have all been management failures. Chernobyl was a management-driven disaster. Fukushima was a management-driven disaster (spraying water on a core to prevent it melting down was a ferociously stupid management decision). The Navy Pacific fleet collisions are management-driven disasters. The first Johnstown Flood was a management-driven disaster. I can go on and on.