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Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

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Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#11

Post by takinola »

rmunn wrote: post #6

Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point…

My issue with this version of explaining the lack of severity of Y2K is that there were lots of countries that were being derided for not taking the issue seriously but did not seem to suffer any ill effects.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#12

Post by arcanemachiner »

hedora wrote: post #10

Two counter-examples: - Arnold bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that would have been perfect for covid response, but the next governor didn’t want to pay 1% the fleet cost per year to maintain it, so he scrapped it. - Under Obama, SARS v1 was stopped by US health workers that Trump fired because it was a “bad deal”. In the absence of that team, we got SARS v2, which was renamed to COVID 19. There’s also the related…

You might want to double check your dates on that SARS claim. Are you talking about the swine flu outbreak?

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#13

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

rmunn wrote: post #6

Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point…

Y2K is especially interesting because the fact that the year 2000 would one day occur was entirely foreseeable, and no less probable in 1990 than in 1999. I can hardly think of anything with closer to 100% probability of happening.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#15

Post by johnthescott »

timmg wrote: post #9

There are a lot of things like this. My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course." Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

"elegance and speed go hand in hand" - d. mcilroy

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#16

Post by mdmabatj »

There is something I saw on a reddit post of all places, about how every manager who doesn't predict a baseline of "3 annoying problems every month, 1 awful problem every 3 months" is essentially a bad manager. The reasoning being that, if your number of problems is under that threshold, then someone is doing a 'good job'.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#17

Post by keyle »

I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves.

Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on.

It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between non-technical management (who understands how to double click) and engineering (who holds the company standing).

I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#20

Post by alduino »

tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #13
rmunn wrote: post #6

Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point…

Y2K is especially interesting because the fact that the year 2000 would one day occur was entirely foreseeable, and no less probable in 1990 than in 1999. I can hardly think of anything with closer to 100% probability of happening.

To be fair, there was a non-zero chance that society could have ended (or your company, or the tech became obsolete) before 2000, which would be higher the earlier before 2000 you were.
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