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Story: “It would be career limiting..."

doomedprojects.com

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Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#281

Post by yarg »

bipson wrote: post #233
xg15 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people around me were trying to hint that things aren't quite as clear cut as it seems, but it took a swift kick in my backside to reboot my worldview. Was your rebooted worldview that you had been factually incorrect (i.e. the senior dev actually did do his work) or was it that you were factually correct, but hierarchy and office culture demanded that everyone pretend you weren't?

You're missing the point. What a novice usually does not realize is: It is easy to be right. What is hard is being actually helpful, coming up with a viable solution (vs. an idea). In the posted article there simply was no such solution. It was not viable. Unacceptable. Yes, an outsider with fresh eyes might see things differently and without bias, but most certainly the experienced team knows damn right that you're…

> It is easy to be right.

It's easier to be wrong.

In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs.

They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues.

They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project.

> It was not viable. Unacceptable.

The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took.

Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice.

But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#282

Post by yarg »

bumby wrote: post #212
acheron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's how the Challenger blew up. Sometimes one side is right, and the other side is wrong, and it doesn't matter if they didn't "communicate and strategize" or "read the room". Obviously this guy is probably writing about a Javascript photo-sharing app or something and it doesn't actually matter, but it's the same principle. The managers who went ahead here would have gone ahead with launching the shuttle for t…

I don't think its the same. In the article, risk was known. "It would be career limiting." The managers knew the risk was to themselves because they weren't offering up a solution. The Challenger was different. There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. That was the main problem; there was an absence of known risk because the operational parameters were outside the testing scope. It was more like "We don't k…

> There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk.

I commented on this the other day; there's a useful NPR article on the subject.

> The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.

> That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#283

Post by andrewflnr »

lumost wrote: post #58

There is also another way of looking at this doomed project. 1. A client didn't know what they wanted, had 60 million to spend on figuring it out, and hired a firm that would let them spend 60 million. 2. The firm was incentivized to provide a nice looking underestimate and then adapt as new work was discovered. 3. The firm continued getting paid as long as the client was happy. 4. The client did not want to be told…

> One unfortunate aspect of the customer is always right is that the customer may often be very wrong.

In other words, "the customer is always right" leads to absurdity even if interpreted generously, so maybe it's actually a bad principle.

Anyway, your optimistic view of the project in OP still does not describe an efficient use of 60M. Lots of us find that morally repugnant, and are not convinced to accept it by interpretations like the one you put forward. When people want to good work instead of bad work, we would prefer that be rewarded, not punished as it was in OP's story.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#284

Post by maest »

Aeolun wrote: post #269
maest wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes you feel any better, I don't think technical issues were the reason HoN failed. For context, I have played a lot of DotA2 and HoN (5.2k hours in DotA2, probably 1k hours in HoN). This is anecdotal, but I was never really bothered by outages and neither were the other people that I played with. Instead, I think HoN made some very bad decisions regarding cosmetics and fostered an extremely toxic playerbase.…

> extremely toxic playerbase > drove me away to play DotA2 How toxic is the HoN playerbase if DotA2 is an improvement? I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed my games as much as in DotA2.

I think the difference comes down to a few things:

* the existence of behaviour score together with a functional report system, which I don't think was a thing in HoN. I'm at 10k behaviour score (max) and there are generally no game ruining griefers. Some people do trash talk sometimes, but nothing too obscene.

* HoN cosmetics actively encouraged players to BM one anther. e.g. the Dumpster Taunt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4j4U7K6mc If you die while taunted you have a dumpster thrown on you and the global announcer tells you to get "dumpstered". Taunting a player right when they die (which is a strongly negative emotional moment) is a great way to tilt them and, in turn, make them grief, com abuse or generally bm. That negatively affects the rest of the players and the cycle goes on.

* A bunch of players in the HoN pro scene had really bad manners, e.g. Moonmeander was notorious for his trash talking, taunting and general BM. He actually significantly toned it down when he moved over to DotA - unclear if that was because he grew up or because the DotA pro scene is a different environment. Regardless, the behaviour of pro players sets the tone for how the community at large behaves, and the DotA pro scene is much nicer. (incidentally, this is why I believe pro players should be held at much higher standards of manners than the rest of the player base. Stuff like saying glhf, gg and generally not acting dickish should be mandatory)

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#285

Post by andrewflnr »

ilaksh wrote: post #200
andrewflnr wrote: post #62

For all the very justifiable shit "Agile" gets, this is what the original "Agile manifesto" agile was supposed to prevent, right? Deliver something early, so you (customer and devs both) learn more quickly what's missing and what will never actually be needed.

In a way but also I think there are unfortunately a lot of consulting firms where the core business model is just to make sure they can keep billing the client for as long as possible. So they will prefer that the project or collection of projects are never really finished and will just keep increasing the scope with no real regard for business outcomes except contract extensions.

See? Even clients benefit from early delivery! The consulting firm can't just bluff about their ability to deliver! I guess the reason I brought it up at all is that this seems like a very preventable tragedy if people grokked some pretty easy principles. Ah, maybe in a generation or two...

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#286

Post by Mathnerd314 »

Jensson wrote: post #232
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you're referring to Feynmann's remarks in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report . The issue there was that management advertised a safety factor of 1 in 10^5 failures while the engineers thought it was more like 10^2, so numbers were fudged across the board to look reasonable. It really was a communication issue in that there was not accurate information on the riskiest parts of the laun…

The managers tries to be nice and make the numbers look a bit better to make the next level of management happy. That is the main problem here, putting engineers who just give you the facts straight up without considering what their managers would feel about it in every part of the chain would solve the problem.

No, according to the Gervais principle engineers are losers who don't know how to run a company. An organization run by engineers would waste their time on unprofitable but technically interesting distractions. The closest economically viable structure is a sociopath plus a small amount of losers, i.e. a startup. But startups don't get $60M contracts until they've grown enough to acquire some middle management.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#287

Post by bumby »

yarg wrote: post #282
bumby wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its the same. In the article, risk was known. "It would be career limiting." The managers knew the risk was to themselves because they weren't offering up a solution. The Challenger was different. There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. That was the main problem; there was an absence of known risk because the operational parameters were outside the testing scope. It was more like "We don't k…

> There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. I commented on this the other day; there's a useful NPR article on the subject. > The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them. > That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205 https:…

I’m familiar with the story, and actually came across your comment a few days ago.

He didn’t feel right about it, but that’s not the same as hard data. They didn’t actually have data on the performance of the material at those temperatures, which is part of the big discussion with his managers. He essentially said, “we don’t know how it will act in those conditions.”

Granted, on a safety critical system, having no data should be a scenario very, very carefully considered as a harbinger of doubt, but having no data isn’t the same as having a concrete understanding of the risk. The problem with large, complex systems is you will always find someone who thinks management isn’t taking a certain risk seriously. I know aerospace engineers who squawk about the risk being too great, yet that’s a 5 sigma industry.

NASA reliability risk is usually quite rigorously defined. If he had hard data that said the risk was outside the acceptable envelope, it would have been relatively easy for the managers to stand behind him (especially when weather is driving that risk).

Columbia was similar. They had lots of data points that the foam shedding wasn’t a problem is different scenarios, but they didn’t have the same evidence about that specific scenario (the deltaV, flight profile, and where it struck).

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#288

Post by yarg »

bumby wrote: post #287
yarg wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk. I commented on this the other day; there's a useful NPR article on the subject. > The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them. > That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205 https:…

I’m familiar with the story, and actually came across your comment a few days ago. He didn’t feel right about it, but that’s not the same as hard data. They didn’t actually have data on the performance of the material at those temperatures, which is part of the big discussion with his managers. He essentially said, “we don’t know how it will act in those conditions.” Granted, on a safety critical system, having no da…

Perhaps - but one engineer with a niggle is a problem, and a room full of them is absolutely a justificantion for re-evaluation.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#289

Post by nitwit005 »

duped wrote: post #47

I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen. You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the…

> You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions.

In other words, do management's job for them. Only, do it vastly better than them, despite having no experience.

> And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people.

And also take responsibility for the issues management created for other departments?

Why do we have managers then? It's not to manage well, and it's not to take responsibility.

Re: Story: “It would be career limiting..."

#290

Post by nitwit005 »

lumost wrote: post #58

There is also another way of looking at this doomed project. 1. A client didn't know what they wanted, had 60 million to spend on figuring it out, and hired a firm that would let them spend 60 million. 2. The firm was incentivized to provide a nice looking underestimate and then adapt as new work was discovered. 3. The firm continued getting paid as long as the client was happy. 4. The client did not want to be told…

Omitted from this article is the details of the contract. Projects taking longer than expected is normal, and there are typically terms spelling out what should happen in that case.
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