"Death by PowerPoint is a real thing. Sometimes literally."
So tacky. Treating human deaths as a punchline to a joke.
Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
61–70 of 135 posts
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly the mission controllers bear some responsibility, but I disagree with diverting blame from the creators of the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint displays extremely clouded thinking. The title is: "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration." What the heck does that even mean? An unclear title is a very strong indicator of unclear thinking about the point being made. Further, there is a relativel…
Yeah, I agree. This is one of the worst slides I've ever seen. A few things I'd add to the above. - The title is extremely unclear: are they supposed to be conservative in their beliefs about the risks (i.e., to not believe that the tile got penetrated), or are they supposed to be conservative in their behavior about the consequences (i.e., reduce risks by not re-entering the damn shuttle)? - wtf does "overpredicted"…
> wtf does "overpredicted" mean? That's the second largest font, and it has no visible meaning?
Honestly, it reads to me as being along the lines of "overestimated" - and in this sentence would mean "reality wasn't as bad as our predictions, so we have a lot more leeway than we thought".
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, it is easy to be wise after the event. However, the management culture at NASA, which was also responsible for the loss of Challenger, and something Richard Feynman also criticized, did not change. This lead to managers ignoring engineers' warnings about the foam strikes on Columbia, and also rejecting requests for high resolution images. This is exactly the same culture which ignored engineers' warnings about…
> Not firing or disciplining these managers will cause similar disasters in future. I think the quote is something like "Why would I fire them, we just lost X lives and dollars training them?"
That doesn't seem to quite square with them being reassigned. In Ham's particular example:
> "Ham's attitude, and her dismissal of dissenting points of view from engineers, was identified as part of a larger cultural problem at NASA.[2] After the report's release, Ham was demoted and transferred out of her management position in the space shuttle program."
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#64No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible. On a side note, the whole first…
There’s definitely audio from all those meetings. You can hear the mission manager plow right through the issues with bureaucratic ease. They’ve seen something similar before and even though it was unexplained, because they’ve seen it, they think it’s a known issue. You want to blame her for it and shake her out of it as you hear her say it, but it wasn’t malicious. I believe the mission manager even had a spouse who…
> There’s definitely audio from all those meetings
Are these accessible publicly? Could someone link to them, if available online? It's not easy to get a deep view into organizational decision making. The least we could do is to learn from mistakes.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#65No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible. On a side note, the whole first…
Your post reads like one of those classic "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" slogans. Sure, but guns make it a whole lot easier. No one is innocent here - there's plenty of blame to go around. One of the key skills in being a senior engineer, is knowing how to communicate clearly with managers and decision-makers who don't have the same level of technical knowledge that you do. Communication is an extremely…
Guns don't kill people. People make very specific decisions that lead to someone's death. I find any argument that blames a tool for someone's death to be suspect when a person or in this case a group of people met and discussed the issue. This wasn't a broken tool that directly lead to the deaths. This is especially problematic given NASA's history with Challenger, previous strikes, and the excellent writing of Richard Feynman on this very subject for this very organization.
A manager, or really anyone who desires to lead, needs to be able to remove the confusion surrounding information. If someone was deliberately not giving information then that another problem, but the slide had the critical phrase at the bottom showing this was way outside the test parameters (600x with some basic math).
I don't deny that the slide was bad and the engineers who put it together failed their profession, but the person at the top needs to be able to get by this.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly the mission controllers bear some responsibility, but I disagree with diverting blame from the creators of the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint displays extremely clouded thinking. The title is: "Review of Test Data Indicates Conservatism for Tile Penetration." What the heck does that even mean? An unclear title is a very strong indicator of unclear thinking about the point being made. Further, there is a relativel…
Just because you don't understand the jargon does not make it incorrect/unclear, have you ever worked at NASA?
If NASA is encoding safety-critical messages in "jargon" that can pass for misleadingly ambiguous plain English, that's a huge safety problem itself. What if it's somebody's first day on the job?
Especially given the sorry state of the presentation in general, I really doubt this is the case, though.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because you don't understand the jargon does not make it incorrect/unclear, have you ever worked at NASA?
If NASA is encoding safety-critical messages in "jargon" that can pass for misleadingly ambiguous plain English, that's a huge safety problem itself. What if it's somebody's first day on the job? Especially given the sorry state of the presentation in general, I really doubt this is the case, though.
Have you ever presented inside a collaboration?
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#68No, the NASA officials are the ones that killed seven people. Is there audio from the presentation? If you are meeting with some group about something that is life or death, you sit your butt down and ask questions until you get the actual situation. They didn't do it for Challenger and they failed to do it for Columbia. You are in charge, the decision is yours and you are responsible. On a side note, the whole first…
The mission leader may have signed the death warrant, but the stage of the execution was set by the engineers who wrote that passive voice nonsense.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
If NASA is encoding safety-critical messages in "jargon" that can pass for misleadingly ambiguous plain English, that's a huge safety problem itself. What if it's somebody's first day on the job? Especially given the sorry state of the presentation in general, I really doubt this is the case, though.
Have you ever presented inside a collaboration?
Yes, and my experience doing so only cements the opinion(s) expressed in my previous comment—to which I'm inclined to say your reply is not terribly relevant.
Ambiguous, poorly presented, and technically dense are three different things, though they can all be present in the same place. Only two of them are necessarily bad.
Re: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people
#70So do they still use PowerPoint like this?