Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rickover's Lessons

chinatalk.media

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#51

Post by loudmax »

piokoch wrote: post #37
cjs_ac wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AUKUS deal is just Australia shovelling money at the US and getting four fifths of fuck all in return, but that's purely for political reasons.

Yup, this is how collective security system works. It is far from perfect, but it managed to keep the World in more or less peace for pretty long time. We had wars, sometimes bloody, but still local once. The corner stone of this system is nuclear weapons nonproliferation. This is, on one hand, unjust - why Australia cannot have its own nuclear arsenal and not be dependent on USA to give them protection? But on the o…

The way things are going, we're likely to see how things turn out without the global nonproliferation system. I'm not looking forward to it.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#52

Post by dghlsakjg »

ethbr1 wrote: post #42
hayst4ck wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rickover's final testimony to congress in 1982 speaks about this: Corporate Power A preoccupation with the so-called bottom line of profit and loss statements, coupled with a lust for expansion, is creating an environment in which fewer businessmen honor traditional values; where responsibility is increasingly disassociated from the the exercise of power; where skill in financial manipulation is valued more than actu…

There's a quip about organizing sales orgs that resonates with me: Expect every salesperson in your company to optimize their own compensation. If you want to change their behavior, then change your sales compensation plan to drive the behavior you want. I don't think this is appreciated enough at the management and CEO level of engineering-based companies. How many engineering-tied metrics were explicitly part of Bo…

This expands to any department, or really any human activity.

I had an econ teacher who loved the phrase Rules, Incentives, Action, Outcome. She even had pens with RIAO printed out for students. The meaning is that each step led inevitably to the other, but also that you could start at the outcome end, and work your way backwards to what rules created that outcome.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#53

Post by dsr_ »

ethbr1 wrote: post #42
hayst4ck wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rickover's final testimony to congress in 1982 speaks about this: Corporate Power A preoccupation with the so-called bottom line of profit and loss statements, coupled with a lust for expansion, is creating an environment in which fewer businessmen honor traditional values; where responsibility is increasingly disassociated from the the exercise of power; where skill in financial manipulation is valued more than actu…

There's a quip about organizing sales orgs that resonates with me: Expect every salesperson in your company to optimize their own compensation. If you want to change their behavior, then change your sales compensation plan to drive the behavior you want. I don't think this is appreciated enough at the management and CEO level of engineering-based companies. How many engineering-tied metrics were explicitly part of Bo…

Sales organizations are often the most game-theoretic rational folks in an organization: a large fraction of their compensation is directly attributable to recent efforts.

That doesn't make them honest or efficient or trustworthy, just canny and responsive.

By way of contrast, operations can only be seen negatively (if things are working, that's normal, and if things are not, that's bad) and development usually has conflicting incentives (stability! and features! and responsiveness! and bugfixes!) with cycle times and group responsibilites obscuring attribution.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#54

Post by lproven »

bilbo0s wrote: post #5

Um. I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done. To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just…

> I don't know how many people on HN... and heard of Rickover?

Eliding "have served" -- not American, don't care.

I suspect the name is familiar to a lot of SF readers, as Rickover reactors play an important part in Kim Stanley Robinson's SF novels about the colonisation of Mars. That's where I know it from.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#55

Post by marbro »

hayst4ck wrote: post #30
nostrademons wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He died in 1986, so everything in the Virginia program happened well after his death. His forced retirement in 1982 was largely because he made a lot of political enemies by making a stink about General Dynamic's flaws in workmanship on the Los Angeles class. His whole management style was to push for accountability and sweat the details. I think what you're country is seeing is general flaws in quality for basically…

Rickover's final testimony to congress in 1982 speaks about this: Corporate Power A preoccupation with the so-called bottom line of profit and loss statements, coupled with a lust for expansion, is creating an environment in which fewer businessmen honor traditional values; where responsibility is increasingly disassociated from the the exercise of power; where skill in financial manipulation is valued more than actu…

Most of the powerful corporations in 1982 no longer exist or are much smaller because there is great turnover in corporate power. Governments don't lose power unless they lose a war, a rare event today that was common 100 years ago.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#56

Post by FootballBat »

_boffin_ wrote: post #20
bilbo0s wrote: post #5

Um. I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done. To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just…

My favorite style is his style and I wish it was more pervasive in the tech sector. At the same time, I understand it’s not practical in today’s society in a practical sense.

I alluded to it above, but I'll say it again here: the only reason the K.O.G. was successful was because he controlled one of the largest budgets in the DoD and people were lining up to kiss his ass to get a piece of that pie regardless of his behavior.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#57

Post by _boffin_ »

FootballBat wrote: post #56
_boffin_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite style is his style and I wish it was more pervasive in the tech sector. At the same time, I understand it’s not practical in today’s society in a practical sense.

I alluded to it above, but I'll say it again here: the only reason the K.O.G. was successful was because he controlled one of the largest budgets in the DoD and people were lining up to kiss his ass to get a piece of that pie regardless of his behavior.

I think you’re right, but also wrong at the same time.

I haven’t read as much as I should have on him, but from the stuff live gleaned, his personality didn’t change once he got into that position of a large budget. Sure, his persona and leadership style evolved along with him, but it was always there. It’s what got him to be what we know today.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#58

Post by throwawaymaths »

gnfargbl wrote: post #49
throwawaymaths wrote: post #3

missing from the account is just how much rickover was hated internally by the navy, until he wasn't. IIRC his office was in converted women's room in the pentagon.

" People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel, " as Maya Angelou has it. Rickover, for all his delivery talents, apparently made a good proportion of people feel like shit.

i don't think that's really it. he was hated because of his interactions with his superiors, not generally because of how he treated people below him.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#59

Post by haneefmubarak »

dctoedt wrote: post #16
bilbo0s wrote: post #5

Um. I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done. To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just…

> He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too. I doubt it would have been that severe unless it was a recurring thing. But it does bring to mind a story told by the USS Enterprise's then-chief engineer, about an episode before my own time aboard. Back in the day, there was a "billet" (org-chart position) kno…

Wait how are there two answers to this? Is shaft length not a well specified term?

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#60

Post by MisterTea »

nostrademons wrote: post #17
ggm wrote: post #2

We don't have time machines and so can't re-run the experiment. I've read biographies of Rickover and not all people who lived through this time are complementary. It's certainly true the strategic arms processes and nuclear submarine engineering benefited in a long term view. I just find myself asking if the US army recruiting tag line Be The Best You Can Be was really met, or if Rickover achieved what might be more…

He died in 1986, so everything in the Virginia program happened well after his death. His forced retirement in 1982 was largely because he made a lot of political enemies by making a stink about General Dynamic's flaws in workmanship on the Los Angeles class. His whole management style was to push for accountability and sweat the details. I think what you're country is seeing is general flaws in quality for basically…

> Which, if I'm being totally blunt, are because *American managers* are lazy and don't care about quality and basically do the minimum that won't get them fired.

FTFY.

I care but I am not allowed to. VC only cares about numbers that are larger then previous numbers. They hire management who tells us to make the numbers go up. those numbers go up with production so production is king. Production can be increased with a decrease in quality if we degrade the process or improving the process preserving quality. Improvement takes time and money - two hard things. So degrade it is. It's cheap, fast, and makes management look like a super star. If management doesn't give a shit, why should you?

Post reply on HN