I got the privilege of having lunch with Mr. McDonald when I was an IEEE officer during college. He gave a lecture at my university on ethics, and the IEEE council got to take him for lunch afterwards.
He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.
He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.
It didn't hurt that Congress basically threatened to administer the corporate death penalty to Morton Thiokol if they retaliated against McDonald and others in any way:
That's post fact. He blew the whistle before and very publicly.
This event almost doesn't matter because he didn't care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.
I believe there's a moment before he doesn't sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...
If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.
Because "keeping it reasonable" doesn't scale so BigCos frequently dis-allow drinking during/immediately prior to work as a blanket policy in order to have grounds for firing anyone who does it to excess.
Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace needs.
Not in a casual setting, but when you're on lunch break and going back to work/a conference/whatever else you're doing professionally after that, it is unusual (and not only in the US, even the Germans, who love beer, tend to only indulge in it after "Feierabend").
My team is in Canada. When I visited them (pre-pandemic) it was routine for the group to have a beer at lunch and maybe even two on a Friday. I've literally never seen anyone do that on any team I've worked on in the States and I've heard it both implied and stated directly, depending on the boss, that doing so could lead to termination. I ordered a beer a few times on those trips and it felt scandalous!
The film “Challenger: The Final Flight” on Netflix includes interviews with the most important participants in the launch decision, including McDonald. (It also has interviews with many of the astronauts’ families and does a great job at putting their experience front and centre.)
The guy whose job it was to send the fax because he happened to be the one who knew how to operate the fax machine is to this day utterly devastated; weeping.
The MTI VP who signed off (although the decision was made above his head) admits that he agreed with it at the time, but acknowledges it was a mistake. He’s being interviewed in a large room full of very expensive furniture.
The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
It's interesting to contrast this with the Chernobyl HBO documentary. Both are engineering disasters, both have very complicated cultural and political underpinnings to why they were allowed to happen. It's not to say the Challenger disaster is comparable to the scale of the Chernobyl disaster, but more crucially: what if the same poor incentives and decisions in place that cause Challenger caused other engineering disasters in the US.
HBO’s Chernobyl is more of a dramatization than a documentary. It certainly doesn’t contain interviews of people who were actually involved. There are quite a few good bits highlighting the dangers of nuclear energy, particularly in the context of the Soviet bureaucracy, but there also a few liberties taken with the science and reality of the event. The fact that people think of it is a documentary despite that is also concerning.
We all deal with the "normalization of deviance" all the time, in large and small ways. Like being in a group where it's "ok to take off your mask" or basically any form of teenage peer pressure. These flaws are basic to humans for obvious reasons (we want to be cool / successful / not problematic) and it takes massive courage to blow the whistle.
I think both of these events together undermined people's general faith in governments to accomplish large scale projects. The two largest superpowers each failed in a big way at a task which should have been within their capabilities.
It shook the assumptions and foundations of modernity and we lurched closer to overvaluing the virtual accomplishments of economic growth and financialization. Wealth is being used to create more wealth, it is not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly:
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
We kept trying after the Apollo 1 fire, we didn't really keep trying after Challenger or Chernobyl. Instead of trying to accomplish truly great and difficult things, we became satisfied with making numbers go up on a Bloomberg terminal.
> The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off the charts.
Well I did work at NASA, although I left for the private sector to finish my career, and this does not describe 99% of the people I met. In the circles I ran in there was a great deal of humility and respect for process as something which saves lives. Maybe it depends on the center? Which part of NASA did your friends work at?
While we’re dunking on nasa , I gave my resume to a recruiter for the nasa jet propulsion lab at a career fair and he said they’d call me and they never called me. Bunch of liars!
You don't manage to get that high up the ladder if you let a silly thing like your conscience bother you.
(This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)
Alan McDonald, the subject of this thread, is clear proof that this is obviously false.
The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.
I saw the interview you're talking about and I admit I respect it.
He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or make it and broke it.
You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
> You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
It's also worth understanding the difference in risks and incentives.
Do you work in an industry where someone failing to speak up about issues with the work will directly risk other coworkers lives?
Where I work, the worst that happens from bad decisions is reduced profits. Besides the personal glory of "being right", there's no upside to sticking ones neck out. Especially if your manager is vindictive, and takes your "being right" over him as a reason to punish you. Better to let bad things happen, and then help fix the inevitable clusterfuck.
At the end of the day, reduced profits aren't great, but they're not an existential threat for the biz where I work.
I had the same takeaway. The guys attitude was “if you want to travel in space you need to take risks and based on what I knew this was a risk worth taking”.
Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it’s not his life that’s at risk, but he does have a point (not necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more generally speaking).
It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management. What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement? Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?"
...
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
The Rogers comission was also just going to bury the problem and almost absolve NASA of guilt, Feynman fought to get his appendix in the report, and he also later said that he was being gently lead to discover the O-rings issue during his investigations.
I remember as a young expat engineer, I've worked for one large consulting job doing UK's NHS's NPfIT project in 2005. I've refused to signoff the architecture due to one of the providers not meeting requirements. One year later I've written a 6 point warning to the C-level of the company, that it's going to fail. Then quit the project and left. Years later, I read that the project was a failure for UK. I still keep my warning letter as a badge of honor, showing to my family and friends.
While I really do respect this person, I can't help but wondering how many people today on HN could make such a decision, especially those who insist to "move fast and break things" or "rough consensus and working code", etc, etc.
Probably not many. (Probably I couldn't either.)
It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job?
99% of folks here don’t deal with life and death matters. When you do, you get a lot of practice at canceling, which helps. There’s also the fact that you can say, “if you do this, people will die,” which is a pretty bright line when you’ve got something to back it up. I actually found it more difficult to take a stand in less consequential fields. But it’s still very, very hard to look someone more powerful in the eye and tell them no. I’ve had to do it and it’s not fun. (Nothing on the scale of a Shuttle launch. I once had to effectively revoke a judge’s flying privileges, for instance.)
McDonald is on a whole other level though. That’s not just your employer, that’s the entire space program. I hope I never have to find out whether I’m made of the same stuff he was.
In my experience, this is not how it works. Very rarely can you say definitively that “people will die”. Reliability is shrouded in uncertainty and the best you can say is, “people may die, eventually ”. If you make too absolute of a claim and it didn’t occur you will gradually erode credibility. Look at Columbia... they knew the foam shedding was out of spec but had so many instances of probability being on their side, if you claimed people would die act each of those launches soon you just become noise. Over a long enough timeline you may be right, but phrasing in that way is unlikely to help in low probability events.
I'm curious to hear what you think about the Therac-25 situation because the line between a code change and fatalities isn't as clear cut as with Challenger, but definitely still there.
Hey, whatever it was, I appreciate people like you are out there regardless of whether the thing got done anyway.
I'm in currently in the valley of death phase of startup life working on a tiny piece of the climate problem, but when the day comes that I'm in a position to hire teams I want them to be able to look me in the eye and oppose me when I'm going off the ethics track. How we got here to needing the climate problem fixed was people making their peace with consequences of their actions, and it's not going to be solved by doubling down on that approach.
In my experience big tech is no more ethical than startups. I respect where you are coming from though, there are plenty of other reasons startups are hard. Much of the ethical tapestry at a startup is on the founders.
I’ve done it too. So it’s you + me + McDonald + ...
You know, for all its evils, it is sometimes surprising that the world is relatively peaceful (for 60% of the globe), full of donators, people fighting for women, people refusing to participate to bad schemes. Even in opposing views, most people are doing it because they believe the world will be better like this. Also, absolute stupid people have always been the norm, and the bad ones have always been assertive and powerful and yet, the world is not so bad, so we are on a good streak.
Well, dog walking apps have pretty major safety issues. They've had problems with crime, serious injuries, pets have died, and all sorts of lawsuits documenting it.
Your broader point is correct, I'm just not so sure everyone is as good at judging where that line is as they think they are.
> It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job?
You decide that ethics and life are more important that your next few paychecks years before the event that makes you stand up and speak out. Sort of the stoic version of dress for the job you want.
For many businesses, from the regular employee perspective, a lot of the hard ethical questions unfortunately got answers and built into policy years agoz often well before platforms and products got big for those that succeeded. Getting old discussions resurrected is and likely will remain a hard problem in human organizations forever.
Perhaps counterintuitively, working on systems with clear life safety concerns often makes it easier since there are very clear consequences. It's one of the reasons for very harsh regulatory penalties, to be big and shocking enough for those that don't have strong ethical paradigms. In the industries I deal with there are several "million dollar per day" fine structures I hear people going on about that I never correct with more accurate information because if they're oblivious enough to not understand they're also oblivious enough to need that fear.
You can't, you have to be galactic citizen and do the right thing or best we end up like the Borg.
If you want to remain true, you have to have FU money and know where that line is. Some peopled don't need that moral cushion, others do, it isn't a value judgement. We need to construct a world where Allan McDonald's can flourish.
I think people with this kind of integrity are very few in general. Being HN participant does not really increase the chances. Might even be the other way around as being smart asses it is easier for us to come up with the reason to keep our conscience quiet.
I do not think it has anything to do with "move fast and break things" way of doing things though. You can't expect the same approach and investment in safety in generic company vs some nuclear power plant or likes.
I've never been faced with a decision so grave as McDonald, but I've done my best over the years and I'm content. There are lots of opportunities to move the needle ethically that don't require sacrifice at all. At least one time the organization actually changed — credit due to the people who listened with open ears.
(Throwaway account because making a difference doesn't necessarily mean making a public show.)
>I can't help but wondering how many people today on HN could make such a decision, especially those who insist to "move fast and break things"
This gets into the argument about whether people who write software should be called engineers. There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
I think it’s kinda like how once digital photography became good enough you didn’t have to worry about wasting film. You can take 20 pics and later pick the best one, rather than spending 20 minutes trying to get the perfect shot.
With software how it is today the “outer software” engineering has created a little virtual realm where things can go haywire and fail but it’s in a mostly padded room. And of course it’s all running within very well regulated and stable hardware.
Maybe coding itself isn’t engineering anymore than welding or running cables is but both computer and software engineering was required for coding and to make the code do anything significant it takes some engineering, or you could just start welding shit together!
>There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
Those aren't mutually excluisive.
Move fast and break things when it comes to crud apps is totally different thing.
You can also use "move fast and break things" in order to achieve "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare"
Yea, I don't think I've really been under that gun either.
About the closest I came was when working in telecom, for a new tech deployment I had my hands pretty deep in the lab environment, so when things were broken in the lab, bad config, etc I would get pulled in troubleshoot and solve the problems.
Well one day 911 wasn't working in the lab and the problem got thrown my way, and it wasn't an obvious problem like someone miss configured something or broke some config somewhere. In telco at the time it was all vendor driven solutions, so I intentionally left the system broken to bring in the vendor to troubleshoot, and it was clear, this is a lab, let's not treat it like production and as such we don't need immediate recovery, we want to get to the root cause so it doesn't happen in production.
The next day, the handset verification team was on me, saying they need this to work immediately since they need to validate some device by such and such date. And I basically said listen, there's a software problem in this product, and we don't want it to go to production. And if I don't get it fixed it could blow up in production on us. I also told them if I don't make progress in a day or two, I would try and reconfigure another environment for them so they would get unblocked, but otherwise was not willing to just reset this system so the problem went away.
I was also doing my own investigation as much as I could since the vendor wasn't always the most reliable, and I encountered something unexpected. It looked like a node was rebooted, so I tracked that down, and found a senior architect who new I was working on solving the issue had rebooted one of the blades. His answer was basically the device team was complaining so he just went in and rebooted the node so they would stop complaining to him.
Luckily, he didn't know enough on how to really reboot the system, so it just synced back with it's backup and still had the problem for us to investigate.
The vendor comes back and goes ah yea, the 911 handler is using the wrong memory region for storing emergency calls, so instead of being able to allocate a hundred thousand records or whatever it was for active emergency calls it was using an administrative region that could only allocate something like 5 calls. This was enough years ago that I forget the exact number, but it was less than 10. Not just that, but there was a second bug, a certain 911 call flow would allocate the call but not release it, which is why we couldn't make any 911 calls in the lab, we had leaked all of the reserved memory for emergency calls.
I just remember being so livid, because the culture for anyone who dealt with that system was it's failure is just in their way, so lets just escalate and try and make it go away so we can continue on with our jobs.
And it would've been so easy to just reset the whole thing so that people would stop complaining. It was just a lab after all.
When you work in the industry writing software which can kill people, it is not so difficult to raise up your voice and say no when it could threaten life of people. Even if you are wrong it is still useful to raise your concern, as this would trigger an in depth analysis. I would say that it is even easier when your company experienced deaths due to products they make.
But.. I am not in the position of being responsible for signing the design which makes my life easier. If an accident happens I have my conscience for myself and proof that I objected.
However, it is much more difficult to gain attention when you cry foul to something unethical being done (diesel gate comes to mind here), even though it can remotely leads to deaths.
It's difficult for sure. It will draw out every ounce of your political skills. It sometimes means leaving your job, and although it doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing your whole career, optimizing for ethics may impede your ability to optimize for other things like compensation or power.
> usually not up to the task
Hmm, "usually"? It sounds like you've done at least something sometime, even though you may not have been satisfied. Kudos for doing what you could under the circumstances. Not everyone needs to go full martyr.
Thank you for your kind words. I have done my best, when I can. Not always comfortable, but I am doing just fine. Still feels like I could have done more.
It is so true. I've done it, not out of ego, but out of passion and belief that it was the right thing, and I've paid the price physically and mentally for it.
I respect and honor this man for what he did. RIP Allan McDonald, and thank you for what you left behind.
This quote from the article helped me, right here, right now:
--- excerpt ---
"What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often stress his laws of the seven R's," Maire says. "It was always, always do the right thing, for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life."
--- end excerpt ---
When people say that it is not just about about what you do, or why you do it, but who you do it with, it is so easy to gloss over that sometimes, it's about doing your part with the right people.
NASA leadership escaped consequences for designing a ridiculously unsafe launch system, and playing politics to choose their 4th rated SRB design to get Utah’s congressional vote.
Readit News
He was not shy at all about saying whatever was on his mind. It was pretty awesome to hear him dunk on his VP, right in the middle of lying to the Rogers commission's face. He was also really open about the fact that nobody at Morton Thiokol trusted him for the better part of a decade after he did that. He said something to the effect of, "It definitely made my career harder, but on the bright side, I never had any major crises of conscience for lying about it.
He also didn't give a single fuck about getting a lunch beer at a student gathering. I wish I'd joined him in drinking beer at noon on a Tuesday on IEEE dime.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-joint-reso...
This event almost doesn't matter because he didn't care he would have gotten demoted - he was driven by being able to do the right thing.
I believe there's a moment before he doesn't sign off on the launch or maybe just before he speaks out against his employer in front of the presidential commission... what will happen to me? what will happen to my family, 4 children? What work will I do? How do I make money? this is all I know...
If you've ever worried about your future, job prospects, the unknown, the fear of not being able to provide, these thoughts are heavy. He made this decision and would gladly make it again regardless of outcome.
I wish I could say the same for myself.
That should be criminal charges.
Also drinking on lunch break is unprofessional (even if you don't do it to excess) in a lot of blue collar fields. How many white collar people lamenting the lack of beer at lunch would turn around and lose their shit if their crane operator had a couple beers? That's a double standard no workplace needs.
The Puritans influence seems to have a long reach. (?)
Deleted Comment
The guy whose job it was to send the fax because he happened to be the one who knew how to operate the fax machine is to this day utterly devastated; weeping.
The MTI VP who signed off (although the decision was made above his head) admits that he agreed with it at the time, but acknowledges it was a mistake. He’s being interviewed in a large room full of very expensive furniture.
The NASA manager who bullied them into agreeing to launch because they couldn’t prove that it was unsafe basically says that if he had his time over he would kill all of the astronauts again. Truly terrifying.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
It shook the assumptions and foundations of modernity and we lurched closer to overvaluing the virtual accomplishments of economic growth and financialization. Wealth is being used to create more wealth, it is not serving any productive purpose, directly or indirectly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization#Roots
>In the United States, probably more money has been made through the appreciation of real estate than in any other way. What are the long-term consequences if an increasing percentage of savings and wealth, as it now seems, is used to inflate the prices of already existing assets - real estate and stocks - instead of to create new production and innovation?
We kept trying after the Apollo 1 fire, we didn't really keep trying after Challenger or Chernobyl. Instead of trying to accomplish truly great and difficult things, we became satisfied with making numbers go up on a Bloomberg terminal.
I only know two people who spent their careers at NASA, but with my small sample size this isn't surprising at all. Both of them have never been wrong in their lives. Their hubris is off the charts.
(This is not a good thing, to be clear, and whoever figures out a systematic solution to this problem will save countless lives in many generations to come.)
The fact that so many people believe this is true, however, is why avoidable accidents like this happen. Being willing to compromise your ethics isn’t bravery.
He had two choices: cowardly pretend it's not his fault or admit that given all he knew, he took a risk to break it or make it and broke it.
You don't know how liberating hearing a guy like that say that. In my company, no way someone says that, they'd rather do absolutely nothing than risk anything.
It's also worth understanding the difference in risks and incentives.
Do you work in an industry where someone failing to speak up about issues with the work will directly risk other coworkers lives?
Where I work, the worst that happens from bad decisions is reduced profits. Besides the personal glory of "being right", there's no upside to sticking ones neck out. Especially if your manager is vindictive, and takes your "being right" over him as a reason to punish you. Better to let bad things happen, and then help fix the inevitable clusterfuck.
At the end of the day, reduced profits aren't great, but they're not an existential threat for the biz where I work.
Of course it comes across as quite callous considering it’s not his life that’s at risk, but he does have a point (not necessarily a valid one for the o-ring issue, but more generally speaking).
https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm
Short and readable.
...2) Massive respect to NPR, for continuing to publish news in HTML with minimal markup, quick loading for anyone to view.
Dead Comment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health that
It's like a nightmare where you can't move and nobody can hear you scream. You can only watch the inevitable disaster unfold.
Probably not many. (Probably I couldn't either.)
It's one thing to praise a hero like him... but how can we be that guy while having a stable job?
McDonald is on a whole other level though. That’s not just your employer, that’s the entire space program. I hope I never have to find out whether I’m made of the same stuff he was.
In my experience, this is not how it works. Very rarely can you say definitively that “people will die”. Reliability is shrouded in uncertainty and the best you can say is, “people may die, eventually ”. If you make too absolute of a claim and it didn’t occur you will gradually erode credibility. Look at Columbia... they knew the foam shedding was out of spec but had so many instances of probability being on their side, if you claimed people would die act each of those launches soon you just become noise. Over a long enough timeline you may be right, but phrasing in that way is unlikely to help in low probability events.
I'm in currently in the valley of death phase of startup life working on a tiny piece of the climate problem, but when the day comes that I'm in a position to hire teams I want them to be able to look me in the eye and oppose me when I'm going off the ethics track. How we got here to needing the climate problem fixed was people making their peace with consequences of their actions, and it's not going to be solved by doubling down on that approach.
You know, for all its evils, it is sometimes surprising that the world is relatively peaceful (for 60% of the globe), full of donators, people fighting for women, people refusing to participate to bad schemes. Even in opposing views, most people are doing it because they believe the world will be better like this. Also, absolute stupid people have always been the norm, and the bad ones have always been assertive and powerful and yet, the world is not so bad, so we are on a good streak.
The mindset is different when building truly critical systems.
There's not really anything unethical about moving fast and accepting the risk that comes with that for most of the things people are building here.
Your broader point is correct, I'm just not so sure everyone is as good at judging where that line is as they think they are.
You decide that ethics and life are more important that your next few paychecks years before the event that makes you stand up and speak out. Sort of the stoic version of dress for the job you want.
For many businesses, from the regular employee perspective, a lot of the hard ethical questions unfortunately got answers and built into policy years agoz often well before platforms and products got big for those that succeeded. Getting old discussions resurrected is and likely will remain a hard problem in human organizations forever.
Perhaps counterintuitively, working on systems with clear life safety concerns often makes it easier since there are very clear consequences. It's one of the reasons for very harsh regulatory penalties, to be big and shocking enough for those that don't have strong ethical paradigms. In the industries I deal with there are several "million dollar per day" fine structures I hear people going on about that I never correct with more accurate information because if they're oblivious enough to not understand they're also oblivious enough to need that fear.
If you want to remain true, you have to have FU money and know where that line is. Some peopled don't need that moral cushion, others do, it isn't a value judgement. We need to construct a world where Allan McDonald's can flourish.
https://youtu.be/FQDe8Y9BBMo?t=100 Be the foundation for the future.
I do not think it has anything to do with "move fast and break things" way of doing things though. You can't expect the same approach and investment in safety in generic company vs some nuclear power plant or likes.
(Throwaway account because making a difference doesn't necessarily mean making a public show.)
This gets into the argument about whether people who write software should be called engineers. There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
With software how it is today the “outer software” engineering has created a little virtual realm where things can go haywire and fail but it’s in a mostly padded room. And of course it’s all running within very well regulated and stable hardware.
Maybe coding itself isn’t engineering anymore than welding or running cables is but both computer and software engineering was required for coding and to make the code do anything significant it takes some engineering, or you could just start welding shit together!
>There is good reason why nearly every engineering body out there has something along the lines of "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare" as the first item in the code of conduct. "Move fast and break things" is pretty much incompatible with engineering.
Those aren't mutually excluisive.
Move fast and break things when it comes to crud apps is totally different thing.
You can also use "move fast and break things" in order to achieve "Hold paramount their duty to public welfare"
Move fast and... does not imply unsafe.
About the closest I came was when working in telecom, for a new tech deployment I had my hands pretty deep in the lab environment, so when things were broken in the lab, bad config, etc I would get pulled in troubleshoot and solve the problems.
Well one day 911 wasn't working in the lab and the problem got thrown my way, and it wasn't an obvious problem like someone miss configured something or broke some config somewhere. In telco at the time it was all vendor driven solutions, so I intentionally left the system broken to bring in the vendor to troubleshoot, and it was clear, this is a lab, let's not treat it like production and as such we don't need immediate recovery, we want to get to the root cause so it doesn't happen in production.
The next day, the handset verification team was on me, saying they need this to work immediately since they need to validate some device by such and such date. And I basically said listen, there's a software problem in this product, and we don't want it to go to production. And if I don't get it fixed it could blow up in production on us. I also told them if I don't make progress in a day or two, I would try and reconfigure another environment for them so they would get unblocked, but otherwise was not willing to just reset this system so the problem went away.
I was also doing my own investigation as much as I could since the vendor wasn't always the most reliable, and I encountered something unexpected. It looked like a node was rebooted, so I tracked that down, and found a senior architect who new I was working on solving the issue had rebooted one of the blades. His answer was basically the device team was complaining so he just went in and rebooted the node so they would stop complaining to him.
Luckily, he didn't know enough on how to really reboot the system, so it just synced back with it's backup and still had the problem for us to investigate.
The vendor comes back and goes ah yea, the 911 handler is using the wrong memory region for storing emergency calls, so instead of being able to allocate a hundred thousand records or whatever it was for active emergency calls it was using an administrative region that could only allocate something like 5 calls. This was enough years ago that I forget the exact number, but it was less than 10. Not just that, but there was a second bug, a certain 911 call flow would allocate the call but not release it, which is why we couldn't make any 911 calls in the lab, we had leaked all of the reserved memory for emergency calls.
I just remember being so livid, because the culture for anyone who dealt with that system was it's failure is just in their way, so lets just escalate and try and make it go away so we can continue on with our jobs.
And it would've been so easy to just reset the whole thing so that people would stop complaining. It was just a lab after all.
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But.. I am not in the position of being responsible for signing the design which makes my life easier. If an accident happens I have my conscience for myself and proof that I objected.
However, it is much more difficult to gain attention when you cry foul to something unethical being done (diesel gate comes to mind here), even though it can remotely leads to deaths.
Major respect to Allan McDonald.
> usually not up to the task
Hmm, "usually"? It sounds like you've done at least something sometime, even though you may not have been satisfied. Kudos for doing what you could under the circumstances. Not everyone needs to go full martyr.
I respect and honor this man for what he did. RIP Allan McDonald, and thank you for what you left behind.
This quote from the article helped me, right here, right now:
--- excerpt ---
"What we should remember about Al McDonald [is] he would often stress his laws of the seven R's," Maire says. "It was always, always do the right thing, for the right reason at the right time with the right people. [And] you will have no regrets for the rest of your life."
--- end excerpt ---
When people say that it is not just about about what you do, or why you do it, but who you do it with, it is so easy to gloss over that sometimes, it's about doing your part with the right people.
For me, this served as a reminder of high value.