I had long term business relationship with a company, originating and developing a product for them.
From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.
But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.
The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.
Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.
The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
Sorry to hear this. It's such a tricky thing for an org to balance, if not impossible.
One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
That company not only failed to "institutionalize" the specialized knowledge they had, once they became big enough for bureaucracy to self-assemble they ended up institutionalizing the concept of not valuing things that led to initial success.
This is correct. Senior management operated intelligently, creatively, benevolently as far as that goes, but intentionally distant. With every management layer tasked with keeping trains running on time, and not making demands on their attention.
Despite the majority of the company's early successes, which still defined the company, coming from individual creatives.
Then the whole company completely missed a major industry wave they had been perfectly built and positioned to ride. My product's last dozen+ years of struggle/stagnation, despite delivering modest progress where I still could, was not a small aspect of that epic whiff.
> The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
I like this. But reality is more like companies have Alzheimer's disease. They're losing memory on top of not being able to form new ones. Slowly at first and when people notice the symptoms it's already too late.
>You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me?
There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable.
In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of cars being specified to understand a 100kmh air speed on the rear windscreen. 'Ridiculous, it can't reverse at more than 30kmh said the car designers' and ignored the spec. The first time new cars were transported on a train, all the rear windscreens blew in.
A long time ago I worked on a software product to try to record design decisions in the creation of long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. The idea being that engineers looking to make a change 20+ years later (when the original engineers had retired) would understand why something had been designed the way it had.
The project was not a success, despite some initial enthusiasm from some commercial sponsors. I think this was due to 2 main issues:
a) The software infrastructure of the days wasn't really up to it. This was just before wikis, intranets etc, which would have made everything a lot easier.
b) The engineers working on the design had no incentive to record the rationale of their decisions. It was extra work with no benefit for them (any benefit was by someone else, years down the line). In fact it could make it more likely for them to be held liable for a bad decision. And, in an age of cheap outsourcing, it could reduce their job security.
The second problem was by far the more important and I don't know how you get around it.
c) Work tends to proceed in drafts/iterations, with earlier initial ideas refined and processed over time. You can record the reasons behind the initial ideas, but eventually those ideas become implicit background and new ideas are diffs against them. It's hard to make all of that explicit and keep it up to date.
You'd think something like wikis would help here because you can see the history. But eventually as you move around in the design space you can make moves that seem obvious but cut across multiple dimensions simultaneously. And it's hard to note something like that well in a wiki commit.
A long form lab notebook (or doc) is often useful here.
That is a good point. The more documentation there is, the harder it is to keep up to date. It also perhaps works against getting the best design, because nobody want to go back and change all the documentation. An argument for keeping the documentation fairly minimal, perhaps.
You have to start thinking about product as the entire provenance chain, not just the end product. That means nobody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor.
Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference.
None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
>[N]obody gets paid for a working reactor. They only get paid for a working AND DOCUMENTED reactor.
Doesn't really pass the market sniff test. Ceteris paribus, I'm pretty sure I'd pay at least ⅒ for a working but undocumented reactor in most situations.
I've heard this is part of why major infrastructure projects in America can be so expensive. A city builds one subway line, and everyone working on the project has no experience, so it takes a long time and is expensive. The expense convinces people to oppose any more projects, so the city doesn't build any public transit for a decade(s). By the time they're ready to build another line, all the experience has evaporated, so the new line takes a long time and is expensive. Repeat forever.
There's an example of this in railway electrification: if you scroll down to the graph in https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmtran... it shows that the UK tends to do electrification as occasional big projects, whereas Germany has consistently done about the same mileage every year for decades, presumably with the same institutions maintaining their expertise and just moving on to the next bit of track. Their costs are a quarter of the UK's...
Not Just Bikes did a YouTube on Seoul South Korea that brought this point up. They’ve got costs down because they’re working on it continuously.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down.
Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
I'm not good at writing documentation, and you can't pay me enough to care about it, sorry. I've tried enough times, and nobody reads it, or it becomes out of date by the time anyone reads it, and I don't see the personal ROI. I'll write notes for future me, and put them somewhere others can read it, if you don't make that onerous. Otherwise, if you want documentation from me, you need to have someone else drag the information out of me and write it down. But, I've only rarely been in organizations that care enough about documentation to do that, so there you go.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
Oh, this is an area I know something about. I work on railway software in my day job.
Broadly speaking you are correct. Expertise like mine is rare and fleeting mostly because you can only really build it long term by working at a company which can convince international clients to take them on. Even large countries tend not to have more than a handful of trains being built on any given day of the week.
This is one place where having a business located in a nation long known for its relative neutrality, calmness and international trustworthiness can pay off. All of the Nordics are good at this, really.
This is also the reason Olkiluoto Nuclear Plant Unit 3[0] cost so much.
Nobody had built a nuclear reactor in ages. The last ones were from the 80's and this was a completely new technology (EPR). There was no institutional knowledge.
It didn't help that the French attitude to building was to "just slap it up real fast up north and use it as a reference to get REAL customers". They didn't figure in the fact that STUK (the Finnish radiation authority) is _really_ fucking good at what they do and don't cut any corners for any reason resulting in the French having to build many parts twice because the first attempt was subpar.
That makes sense. It seems like during the continuous "building up America" period of the late 40s through mid 70s there was no problem of getting shit done at reasonable cost, because of continuously available institutional knowledge.
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
Somehow, other nations have managed to figure this out. Of the developed world, seemingly only Americans are resigned to the belief that such things are sadly impossible.
Robert Moses did a lot of bad that we don't want to repeat. We have gone too far the other way but those big projects often did come at high cost - but the cost wasn't dollars
There’s strategic bidding as well. Specifications cannot cover every conceivable occurrence over the course of a 4 year construction project, so contractors can structure their bid to be low upfront with big pick ups later for change orders when issues arise.
Thank you for bringing this up. This is profoundly true for big projects (toll roads/transport) and small infra projects (e.g. community solar). The length of time that it takes to develop things like this, combined with the turnover and the sheer amount of context that single developer has to have to be successful with it, is one of the driving forces in why development is such a difficult/risky business.
It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.
Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.
Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.
We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
Not just that, it can be worse when different companies worked on different parts of the subway. It results in no overall vision and desire to see subway network as a whole to make it efficient and convenient to get from any part of the city to another.
Not just that, it can be worse when different companies worked on different parts of the subway in the city. It results in no overall vision and desire to see subway network as a whole.
I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese optical equipment manufacturer. It had a lot of institutional memory (detractors like to call it “tribal memory.” I guess, because it makes it sound more primitive).
Lots of “wise old men,” lots of rituals, and “we just do things this way” practices. Long apprenticeships, tons of training, and a metric shitton of paper trails.
But I could always get an explanation for why something was the way it was. Not many Chesterton’s Fences, and some damn interesting stories.
It could be maddening, especially for a software engineering manager (Yours Truly), but they got outstanding results. In fact, they suffered some real damage, when they tried to leave a lot of that behind, and have since returned to “the old ways.”
That's fascinating. I really do like that you found that you could get an explanation for everything.
It's a real problem for any culture when the explanations for why things are are either forgotten or actively suppressed. This is what tradition means. Sadly, in recent history, tradition has been attacked as thoughtless, if quaint convention, and discarded without prior investigation when it stands in the way of something someone wants. This view makes it easier to discard it in order to fill the void with something else; power becomes the rule. And sure, most people do follow convention without a deeper or thorough grasp of its reasons -- it is difficult to expect too much from the average person in this regard -- but part of what a cultural elite is for is to maintain tradition, to transmit it to the next generation along with its explanations, so that it can develop, so that it avoid both the calcification into mere empty convention as well as the loss of the wisdom that constitutes is. A cultural elite acts like a kind of referee to modulate cultural developments in light of prior knowledge.
This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work.
This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
Back when Anderson Consulting hadn't yet disgraced itself, a corp I worked for hired them for a cost-cutting project. "Find ways we can cut costs."
Blew my mind that 22-year olds, fresh out of good-brand universities (their "qualification"), were doing the research on how to cost-cut. Chesterton's fences all over the place were violated. It was sad watching the slow-moving disaster.
That’s a great point. In my city, they started paving side streets with with in-house staff. They have dedicated funded budget, government can borrow cheaply, and they don’t need to price risk and margin.
Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather)
For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
I am currently on a team of consultants. Ironically, most of us have more institutional knowledge than the client due to internal churn. Seems like every few years they try to cut our utilization in favor of some off-shore company that's "cheaper", the project blows up, then we have to jump in and save some middle manager's job.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Other relevant context: sections of UK canals being unintentional drained isn't particularly unusual, although the culprit is usually a paddle left open on a lock gate or a leaky culvert rather than a plug being pulled. Whether that inconveniences anyone for any length of time depends mostly on how full the reservoirs at the top end of the canal are...
Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
For instance TSMC is discussed a lot on HN and every time I'm thinking that even TSMC itself probably couldn't produce their latest chips if they had to start from scratch tomorrow.
It can be documents and it can be people, but it's not essentially either one. It can take many forms, including being lost when none of those forms has it on offer, as every business is different. An institution with excellent documentation, mature processes, and adept hiring could retain its "memory" without a single human member remaining from the past. Oral history and other humanistic forms of memory make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but they're not to be idealized as the only real memory simply because they were underappreciated for a some time.
1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things.
2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams.
3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
There’s a balance to these things. I worked for a well run large government bureaucracy that was both confounding and frustrating and great at execution.
The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated.
The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.
Readit News
From 50 - 1000 employees things worked very well. There was a great deal of continuity in the relationship. Lots of trust and flexibility in both directions. Our product quickly became the best available, by a long margin, and for a couple decades.
But after they passed about 1500 - 2000 employees they got more organized. A formalized organization and process system. Things quickly went downhill. As someone working from outside the company, their processes were incredibly disruptive and inefficient for me. Likewise, their turnover replaced a situation of working with long time friendly colleagues, who knew me very well, to working with people who had no idea what my positive reputation was, my track record of delivering quality without the hammer of conformance, etc.
The project's ambitious upward trajectory stalled. Even then it took about ten years to fall behind other players. But it never recovered. Today it operates deep in the shadows of others.
Virtually every employee I worked with was wonderful, inclined to be as supportive as restrictions allowed, etc. But the institutionalization smothered the organizations ability to operate with any flexibility, no matter how dysfunctional or value destroying the results.
The company became like someone who has permanently lost the ability to form new memories.
You can't build anything special with someone who keeps forgetting any context. I spent many years cycling between depression and resurrected determination trying. But finally gave up.
One thing I notice is it's very easy to add additional layers of relatively small actual value that look like lots of value. So you might say you've earned a degree of respect by working consistently for years, and people don't mind that you don't always update your status reports. But then if you don't defend vigorously in the org, someone might come in who does very little work in terms of company output, but always gets your status reports in and reports up the chain so you "don't have to". And that looks like value to the person above, but it wasn't really. And now you have a new boss.
Despite the majority of the company's early successes, which still defined the company, coming from individual creatives.
Then the whole company completely missed a major industry wave they had been perfectly built and positioned to ride. My product's last dozen+ years of struggle/stagnation, despite delivering modest progress where I still could, was not a small aspect of that epic whiff.
I like this. But reality is more like companies have Alzheimer's disease. They're losing memory on top of not being able to form new ones. Slowly at first and when people notice the symptoms it's already too late.
Was that an LLM reference or is it the myopia in me?
There's a parallel here, either way. All the documentation in the world will not make a person, or llm session interchangable.
In some sense the new way of coding feels like building a big org with people without memory. If you can document the process perfectly, there is a holy grail out there somewhere.
Or maybe there isn't.
└── Dey well; Be well
A long time ago I worked on a software product to try to record design decisions in the creation of long-lived artefacts, such as nuclear reactors. The idea being that engineers looking to make a change 20+ years later (when the original engineers had retired) would understand why something had been designed the way it had.
The project was not a success, despite some initial enthusiasm from some commercial sponsors. I think this was due to 2 main issues:
a) The software infrastructure of the days wasn't really up to it. This was just before wikis, intranets etc, which would have made everything a lot easier.
b) The engineers working on the design had no incentive to record the rationale of their decisions. It was extra work with no benefit for them (any benefit was by someone else, years down the line). In fact it could make it more likely for them to be held liable for a bad decision. And, in an age of cheap outsourcing, it could reduce their job security.
The second problem was by far the more important and I don't know how you get around it.
c) Work tends to proceed in drafts/iterations, with earlier initial ideas refined and processed over time. You can record the reasons behind the initial ideas, but eventually those ideas become implicit background and new ideas are diffs against them. It's hard to make all of that explicit and keep it up to date.
You'd think something like wikis would help here because you can see the history. But eventually as you move around in the design space you can make moves that seem obvious but cut across multiple dimensions simultaneously. And it's hard to note something like that well in a wiki commit.
A long form lab notebook (or doc) is often useful here.
One way is by recording video calls where the decisions are made with transcriptions which can be interpreted by LLMs.
Another is generating docs from tests.
Yet another is making a rule that answers to code review questions must be turned into code comments.
There's also a huge amount of untapped potential for turning conversations in slack into documentation.
The issue with wikis, etc. is yea, that it isnt a side effect of the work itself. It is work, and thankless work at that.
Related, you have to make it benefit the current generation of engineers as well. Want to get your thing built? Deliver your designs in format X, which also happens to support long term reference.
None of this is easy… but it is actually possible to align incentives like this. You just have to do it from very high up, and with a very firm hand.
Unfortunately that is rather easy to game. Especially in an age of LLMs.
Doesn't really pass the market sniff test. Ceteris paribus, I'm pretty sure I'd pay at least ⅒ for a working but undocumented reactor in most situations.
So whatever the Germans are doing with their rail, thank god the UK isn't.
As a tech writer people have a lot of experience but they never turn it into institutional knowledge because it’s never written down. Ay best it’s tribal knowledge passed by word of mouth.
I know some people refuse to document things because they are hoping for job security but that never happens. Or sometimes for revenge for getting rid of them. But many companies survive despite those efforts.
There's always a lot of talk about how documentation is important, but there's never budget for a tech writer (well, you must have found some, as you've taken tech writer as a title, but it's not often available) or a documentation maintainer.
Broadly speaking you are correct. Expertise like mine is rare and fleeting mostly because you can only really build it long term by working at a company which can convince international clients to take them on. Even large countries tend not to have more than a handful of trains being built on any given day of the week.
This is one place where having a business located in a nation long known for its relative neutrality, calmness and international trustworthiness can pay off. All of the Nordics are good at this, really.
Nobody had built a nuclear reactor in ages. The last ones were from the 80's and this was a completely new technology (EPR). There was no institutional knowledge.
It didn't help that the French attitude to building was to "just slap it up real fast up north and use it as a reference to get REAL customers". They didn't figure in the fact that STUK (the Finnish radiation authority) is _really_ fucking good at what they do and don't cut any corners for any reason resulting in the French having to build many parts twice because the first attempt was subpar.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_and_Nuclear_Safety_A...
Once large infrastructure projects become sporadic in nature, you begin to run into issues.
The solution has to be continuous stimulus, but that also runs into problems of corruption and capture by special interests (the longer the stimulus, the more incentive there is for 3rd parties to appropriate funds).
It's one of the most consequential problems imaginable to solve, particularly as the US begins to realize that we need to compete with decades of China's subsidized energy and industrialization/manufacturing capacity.
Taking it a level deeper, what most don't realize is that infrastructure is an asset class: before someone funds the construction of $100M of solar technology, a developer will spend 2-5 years developing 15 or so major commercial agreements that enable a lender/financier to take comfort that when they deploy such a large amount of cash, they'll achieve a target yield over 20+ years. Orchestrating these negotiations (with multiple "adversaries") into a single, successfully bankable project is remarkably difficult and compared to the talent needed, very few have the slightest clue how to do this successfully.
Our bet at Phosphor is that this is actually solvable by combining natural language interfaces with really sophisticated version control and programming languages that read like english for financial models and legal agreements, which enables program verification. This is a really hard technical challenge because version control like Git really doesn't work: you need to be able to synchronize multiple lenses of change sets where each lens/branch is a dynamic document that gets negotiated. Dynamically composable change sets all the way down.
We are definitely solving this at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and we're actively hiring for whoever is interested in working at the intersection of HCI, program verification, natural language interfaces and distributed systems.
We just do subways and get good at it.
Lots of “wise old men,” lots of rituals, and “we just do things this way” practices. Long apprenticeships, tons of training, and a metric shitton of paper trails.
But I could always get an explanation for why something was the way it was. Not many Chesterton’s Fences, and some damn interesting stories.
It could be maddening, especially for a software engineering manager (Yours Truly), but they got outstanding results. In fact, they suffered some real damage, when they tried to leave a lot of that behind, and have since returned to “the old ways.”
It's a real problem for any culture when the explanations for why things are are either forgotten or actively suppressed. This is what tradition means. Sadly, in recent history, tradition has been attacked as thoughtless, if quaint convention, and discarded without prior investigation when it stands in the way of something someone wants. This view makes it easier to discard it in order to fill the void with something else; power becomes the rule. And sure, most people do follow convention without a deeper or thorough grasp of its reasons -- it is difficult to expect too much from the average person in this regard -- but part of what a cultural elite is for is to maintain tradition, to transmit it to the next generation along with its explanations, so that it can develop, so that it avoid both the calcification into mere empty convention as well as the loss of the wisdom that constitutes is. A cultural elite acts like a kind of referee to modulate cultural developments in light of prior knowledge.
In that company, age was actually celebrated and respected (kind of alien, to Silicon Valley).
This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
Blew my mind that 22-year olds, fresh out of good-brand universities (their "qualification"), were doing the research on how to cost-cut. Chesterton's fences all over the place were violated. It was sad watching the slow-moving disaster.
Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather)
For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
> What happened next, you may not be surprised to hear, comes in different versions. The person who spotted that there might be a problem may have been a member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary…
>> While they were away, a passing policeman noticed an extraordinary whirlpool in the normally placid canal. He also noticed that the water level was falling. He rushed off to find the dredging gang. By the time they all returned, the canal had disappeared. It was then that realisation dawned. Jack and his men had pulled out the plug of the canal. One-and-a-half miles of waterway had gone down the drain.
> It may have been three anglers who raised the alarm, and given that they have names — Howard Poucher, Graham Boon and Pete Moxon — maybe that version’s true. Another telling says it wasn’t until the evening that
>> local police contacted Stuart Robinson, the British Waterways section inspector.
Wouldn't have been that unusual in 1972 when nearly all the canals including that one had ceased commercial operations and many of them had been intentionally drained either. I suspect the transition from the canal being infrastructure maintained by locally-stationed full time professionals to a pleasure cruiseway which the new waterways board was willing to devote a bit of time to maintaining only after the previous one had spent several years trying to get it shut down probably had as much impact as the Blitz on the work crew having no idea about plugholes...
Deleted Comment
Institutional memory is not information or documents - it's people.
Every single real-world process has implicit knowledge. And you can't always capture that knowledge of paper.
But, many corporations seem to want to get rid of their most experienced people to save money and have better quarterly results for the stock market.
1. Institutional memory does seem important. It feels like lots of government things are bad at this – big infrastructure projects tend to come in occasional bursts which means each time they are learning from scratch; Japan moves lots of civil servants around every few years which means that no one really remembers how to do things.
2. I think there is a negative side of this too, a kind of ‘institutional trauma’ where some bad memory can cripple an institution. Eg one reason Microsoft lost so much to Google in the early Internet was the memory of the late ’90s antitrust action making them less aggressive. Other companies can have one particular close shave which then causes them to focus too much on avoiding a repeat, a situation you also see writ small in tech teams.
3. I think a bit about production incidents in tech too here. When things are small and the systems are relatively new and they break a lot, this may be ok for the business and recovery can hopefully be fast because it is possible to quickly hypothesise / fix stupid problems. When most silly bugs have been squashed and systems are big and reliable, problems can snowball faster, the business may be more sad about them happening, people can’t understand the whole picture well enough to have good ideas, and the lower base rate of incidents means people will be more stressed or otherwise unable to focus on the actual problem
The organization executed the mission very well. They had solid process and controls. They knew why they had the controls. People were really smart and motivated.
The confounding part was that any change was impossible because there was an expectation of that level of rigor for new things. Literally took a year to approve using Google.