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Rickover's Lessons

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Re: Rickover's Lessons

#91

Post by class3shock »

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…

You are literally repeating the classic - "younger generation" are "negative adjective" and not as "positive adjective" as "older generation" and thus can't hack it - which has been going on since the beginning of time.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#92

Post by Juliate »

MisterTea wrote: post #60
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…

> 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…

If your n+1 doesn’t give a shit, why should you stay and enable this carelessness?

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#93

Post by mmooss »

dylan604 wrote: post #88
mmooss wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Viewed from Australia the current state of US submarine construction is woeful. It was great for the War on Terror era, when submarines were only useful against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS aircraft carriers. :) Spending money on subs, which includes staffing, operating, and maintaining them, was a waste. Now the US needs to build capacity, which takes time. It turns out that getting the next AI startup moving i…

> MVPs generally are not good for submarine warfare. I've heard enough stories that makes me feel like there are plenty of examples of the PoC rushed to production level experiences with various military equipment.

To address it seriously: If they rush the PoC, the result is more problems and in life-and-death, national security situations, and people complain. If they are more careful, people complain about the beaurocracy holding back the military, with all their requirements for proper specifications, testing, etc.

It's a pendulum many people in tech deal with. But I resent seeing officials, who know better, taking one side or the other in order to always criticize the people doing the hard work of managing these very complex, often cutting-edge projects.

At one point, for at least some projects, the Department of Defense elimated the professional managers and had military officers manage their projects directly. What could go wrong?

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#94

Post by Peteragain »

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…

"measurement disfunction" - measuring something your people do leads to it being the only thing the people do. And some things are hard to measure. When the decided they could make trams run on time by giving penalties to drivers who were late, trams stopped stopping for passengers. True story. Leadership (vision) and arranging for resources to get the job done - that is, I think, the moral of the Rickover story.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#95

Post by amanaplanacanal »

loudmax wrote: post #51
piokoch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current US administration isn't much interested in understanding how the system works, they are focused on the $$, which is what they do understand. Putting billionaires in charge of government is maybe not such a good thing.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#96

Post by MisterTea »

Juliate wrote: post #92
MisterTea wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If your n+1 doesn’t give a shit, why should you stay and enable this carelessness?

Because you get paid no matter what. edit: to add, this is a recent development so of course I am looking to leave.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#97

Post by CobaltFire »

sgarland wrote: post #77
selimthegrim wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just make sure that you read this article to complement it: https://quietwarriors.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

I had not heard of Captain Schratz until now, but what I did find of him [0] makes me think that he may have had it out for Rickover: > During [the 1960s], Schratz believed, he lost his opportunity for major command because he published a facetious story in 1963 about Vice Admiral H. G. Rickover's burial plans. Furthermore, he either is unaware of, or elides parts of stories that would refute his implications: > Havi…

Thanks for the in-depth research; I should have done similar.

Your experience mirrors mine, down to the cranking being a vacation.

As I alluded to elsewhere I ended up outside Engineering for a substantial part of my career. Amusingly towards the end of my career I was offered a leadership position in the Engineering Department (I was in the Aviation Department, and this was an LHA) due to my background and my reputation within weeks of transferring onboard. It was unheard of, and there were some interesting meetings in the CPO Mess and Wardroom that I was involved in for that, but I ended up not taking it because I simply didn't want the hours.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#98

Post by dj_gitmo »

nradov wrote: post #46
cossatot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read Eric Berger's Reentry about SpaceX and having a few friends who work at Tesla, my impression is that those organizations are not too dissimilar. They are also populated largely by millenial and gen Z people because older workers can't/won't deal with the hours and other working conditions. Furthermore I think most blue collar American workers, and many white collar workers, are used to the concept of sudd…

So why is the quality and reliability of Tesla products so bad compared to competitors? From an outside perspective it seems like Tesla engineers are generally lazy and incompetent, at least relative to an organization like Naval Reactors which maintains much higher standards.

They are not being tasked with making Toyota like reliability. That is not what made Tesla successful. Falcons are pretty reliable. With that said, Musk went crazy a few years ago and people are just now starting to realize.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#99

Post by Juliate »

MisterTea wrote: post #96
Juliate wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your n+1 doesn’t give a shit, why should you stay and enable this carelessness?

Because you get paid no matter what. edit: to add, this is a recent development so of course I am looking to leave.

Very valid reason. But beware that it does not weigh on you and burn you out. Been there several times. It always hurts, but I should have left even earlier each time.

Re: Rickover's Lessons

#100

Post by fritzo »

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…

Point taken, though I'd like to charitably think Americans are 'lazy' the way Haskell is lazy or Japanese Kanban or Jidoka is lazy. As MisterTea points out, the VCs invest in metrics, management pushes on metrics, and productive engineers deliver metrics at the cost of bugs and tech debt. Then we engineers wait for bug reports to percolate down, and we respond only as needed. On Sundays we repent by writing elegant high-quality code that nobody uses. We feel deeply that something is wrong.
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