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

https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_.pdf

by sam_bristow • 1 month ago

793 262 1 month ago

web.mit.edu

lstodd2• 1 month ago

The combined expenditure of U.S. companies on management consul- tants and training in 1997 was over $100 billion

erhm, if this figure is close to true i can see what market ai companies is after.

jacques_chester3• 1 month ago

AI slots quite neatly into the capability trap model, actually.

Which loop it belongs to in the model is left as an exercise for the reader.

Jtsummers• 1 month ago

Two significant prior discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820 - 24 Jan 2015, 50 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693 - 22 Feb 2024, 434 comments

jacques_chester3• 1 month ago

You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.

Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.

Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.

macrocosmos• 1 month ago

One thing I don't get about the concept of capability traps is why is it expected that a company which is good at one thing would be capable at the new thing? What exactly makes a capability trap a trap?

jacques_chester3• 1 month ago

The trap is that you can't get better without first getting worse. You can't get out of the destructive cycle of production pressure and decaying productivity without removing the pressure. Many managers expect, or at least behave as if they expect, improvement to be monotonic and costless.

left-struck• 1 month ago

I think because it’s a negative feedback cycle. So once it starts it’s hard to go back, the deeper you are the harder. A trap is something that’s easy to get into and hard to get out of.

rmunn6• 1 month ago

Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point would airplanes have been falling out of the sky — I literally heard someone say that would happen once — even if no effort had been put into fixing the bug).

But in recent years I have seen people (elsewhere, not on HN) claim that Y2K was a big nothingburger, and all the money spent on fixing the bug was wasted. No, that's not true either. All the money spent on fixing the bug was why it turned into a big nothingburger. Sure, some of that money was wasted, by executives who wanted an "official" Y2K-certified certificate, issued by a consulting firm that had nothing "official" about it except their own say-so. And so they spent $2 million learning what their own employees could have told them for $2,000. THAT money was wasted. But a lot of banks were running old COBOL code that used 2-digit years, and needed to be fixed. The fact that in January 2000, everyone's bank interest was still calculated correctly, and not calculated as if it was January 1900? THAT was entirely due to the vast amounts of money spent paying old COBOL coders to come out of retirement and fix the 2-digit years.

The lesson I learned from that is that it's possible for a problem to be overhyped, even massively overhyped, and yet still be a serious problem. The other lesson I should have learned is that people rarely get credit (I won't go so far as the article authors and say "nobody ever gets credit") for fixing problems that never happened.

armada651• 1 month ago

The problem is that a lot of people have a very binary view on life. Either something is a complete success or a complete waste of money, rarely do we accept that most projects fall somewhere in the middle.

cortesoft• 1 month ago

And even worse, they don't think probability is a thing. If something happens, it was certain to happen and we just failed to predict it correctly.

So when someone predicts something will happen with a 90% probability, and then the 10% chances happens and the predicted event does not happen, people will talk about what a bad prediction that was and how they were clearly wrong.

It's the same logic that causes people to say vaccines don't work because they don't stop a disease with 100% effectiveness, or that there is no point to wear a seatbelt because people still die while wearing one.

yvdriess• 1 month ago

The binary view is mostly true, unless it's for events or problems they are themselves familiar with. There is a term for this, but can't for the life of me remember it: People think the problems they are dealing with are infinitely more nuanced, complex and unique than the problems other people are dealing with.

takinola• 1 month ago

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

akoboldfrying• 1 month ago

This is interesting, do you have any links?

A couple of possible confounding factors I can think of:

1. Plenty of countries use software developed elsewhere.

2. I suspect that the more recently you computerised your economy, the less likely it would be to have code vulnerable to Y2K.

tjwebbnorfolk• 1 month ago

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

alduino• 1 month ago

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

Dwedit• 1 month ago

Year 2038 says hi.

marcus_holmes2• 1 month ago

my first thought too. I've met a few people who assert that Y2K was a complete waste of money.

I earned my first house deposit helping the team fixing the water and gas company in Wales, UK. Their entire system was running off a set of COBOL programs on a mainframe, none of which had been properly documented over the years, and the whole thing used 2-digit dates. It would have caused actual deaths if not fixed; everything would have shut down, and no water and no heating in a British winter is potentially lethal. And then it would have sent everyone in Wales a bill for 100 years of water and gas.

They were bribing retired software devs to come out of retirement with huge stacks of money, because that was cheaper than training new COBOL devs and getting them familiar with the spaghetti system.

It worked, no-one died, life went on. So obviously it was all fake rolls eyes

rmunn6• 1 month ago

I'm curious why things would have shut down when the system thought it was 1900. What part of the logic had the effect of "shut the system down if current date is less than (X date)?" (If you can remember the code 25+ years later, that is).

kristiandupont2• 1 month ago

no, at no point would airplanes have been falling out of the sky

The assertion may have been unfounded, but I think it's just as unreasonable to assert the opposite. Bugs have cascading effects and in a sufficiently complex piece of software they can create chaos with unpredictable outcomes.

rmunn6• 1 month ago

The one case I'm aware of where a software glitch did cause a plane crash, there was pilot error compounding the problem. Air France flight 447 was an Airbus A330 flying from France to Brazil, and while high over the Atlantic, the software recorded inconsistent data in its airspeed measurements. (The official crash analysis team concluded that the inconsistent data was likely due to ice crystals blocking the pitot tubes on the plane). The inconsistent data made the autopilot disengage. Pilot error then caused a stall. One pilot then tried the correct move to recover from a stall, pushing forward on the stick to nose down and regain speed. The other pilot was pulling up on the stick to stop the dive, not realizing that that's exactly the wrong thing to do in a stall (or more likely forgetting his training due to panic; he had a lot less experience). The flight software, receiving inconsistent inputs from both controls, averaged the inputs, resulting in zero change in pitch. (It also sounded the "Dual Input" alarm, but the pilots were too preoccupied with their own controls to figure out what that meant at first, and by the time they figured out what was going on it was too late to recover before the plane hit the water).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224707 has some discussion of the events, including the fact that the control design (where each pilot has an independent stick) was part of the problem. On a design like Boeing uses where both sets of controls move together, the experienced pilot would have noticed the less-experienced pilot pulling up on the stick because his own stick would be moving, and he would have said "No, nose down." And if they had nosed down to recover speed while still high enough in the air, they almost certainly could have regained control of the plane and saved 228 lives (including their own).

So in retrospect, I think my first sentence was wrong. The software did not glitch, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was pilot error that caused the initial stall, and multiple pilot errors that caused the failure to recover from the stall.

There may be examples of software error that has caused planes to fall out of the sky, but I don't know of any. The only plane crashes whose cause I know were due to hardware failure or pilot error, usually a combination of the two.

random3• 1 month ago

Like nobody gets credit for avoiding problems or unnecessary things/complexity altogether. In fact the opposite may happen.

timmg• 1 month ago

There are a lot of things like this.

My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course."

Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

johnthescott• 1 month ago

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

npunt• 1 month ago

I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or indirectly via others, it seems like complexity is not as impressive as it once was.

nomel2• 1 month ago

Definitely. Previously, intent and effort were required to increase complexity. Now intent and effort are required to prevent complexity*!

But also, what a beautiful problem to have!

nullhole2• 1 month ago

The passage that comes to mind for me whenever this idea comes up, from the Brett version of the Holmes story "The Dancing Men":

  H: So, Watson.
  W: Hmm.
  H: You do not propose to invest in South African securities?
  W: How on earth do you know that?
  H: Now, confess, you are utterly taken aback.
  W: I am!
  H: I should make you sign a paper to that effect.
  W: Why?
  H: Because in a few minutes you will say it is all so absurdly simple.
  W: I should say nothing of the kind!
  H: You see, my dear Watson, it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect.
  H: I can tell by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, that you have decided not to invest your small capital in the gold fields.
  W: I can see no connection.
  H: Very likely not; but I can quickly give you a close connection.
  H: Here are the missing links in the very simple chain: You had chalk between your forefinger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. You put chalk there when you play billiards, to ease the cue. You never play billiards except with Thurston. Now, Thurston, you told me, four weeks ago, had an option on some South African security which expired in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. Your checkbook is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. So, you do not propose to invest your money in that manner.
  W: How absurdly simple!
  H: Quite so. Every problem is absurdly simple when it is explained to you.

Terr_• 1 month ago

Found the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx6Dr1iJ4p8&t=3m13s

barrenko• 1 month ago

Liking it, but I think it's even better captured by the more lauded quote -

H: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

teddyh2• 1 month ago

Why on earth would you quote a TV version of a book, when the book is readily available to be cited?

⁂

“So, Watson,” said he, suddenly, “you do not propose to invest in South African securities?”

I gave a start of astonishment. Accustomed as I was to Holmes's curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into my most intimate thoughts was utterly inexplicable.

“How on earth do you know that?” I asked.

He wheeled round upon his stool, with a steaming test-tube in his hand and a gleam of amusement in his deep-set eyes.

“Now, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback,” said he.

“I am.”

“I ought to make you sign a paper to that effect.”

“Why?”

“Because in five minutes you will say that it is all so absurdly simple.”

“I am sure that I shall say nothing of the kind.”

“You see, my dear Watson”—he propped his test-tube in the rack and began to lecture with the air of a professor addressing his class—“it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small capital in the goldfields.”

“I see no connection.”

“Very likely not; but I can quickly show you a close connection. Here are the missing links of the very simple chain: 1. You had chalk between your left finger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. 2. You put chalk there when you play billiards to steady the cue. 3. You never play billiards except with Thurston. 4. You told me four weeks ago that Thurston had an option on some South African property which would expire in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. 5. Your cheque-book is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. 6. You do not propose to invest your money in this manner.”

“How absurdly simple!” I cried.

“Quite so!” said he, a little nettled. “Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you. […]”

— The Adventure of the Dancing Men, The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, January 1904, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/108/pg108-images.html#c...>

fugaziboutit• 1 month ago

"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

("I have made this longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.")

Blaise Pascal

kristiandupont2• 1 month ago

I am reminded of this course in university where there was a written assignment with a minimum page count. Even at that time, I remember thinking: "If I am able to express everything necessary in just one page, that should give me the absolute top grade!".

k3liutZu• 1 month ago

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

HerbManic4• 1 month ago

I have said it for decades - Basic is easy, Simple is hard.

But when someone comes up with something simple but effective, it always looks so obvious in retrospect.

godelski• 1 month ago

  > elegant solutions

My favorite is how people will yell at you about how elegance doesn't matter, that they "just care that it works", and "keep it simple". I'm certain all the sayings repeated in industry are metastasized variants of actually good practices repeated by those who can't be bothered to understand what they mean.

And of course that's true. We push for speed, absent of direction, while praising velocity. To be honest, at this point I'm disappointed the engineers gave up and just started becoming business people.

roncesvalles• 1 month ago

Every company where I've worked at as a SWE openly rewarded "engineering complexity" as a criteria for getting promoted, which I've always found to be absurd because complexity can always be manufactured (both of the problem and the solution).

ocimbote• 1 month ago

There was a thread recently on HN about Claude Shannon and how his papers were filled with clear descriptions and explanations. Then someone commented how they had found an elegant solution to a problem that either could be described shortly and beautifully so that a high schooler could understand or take the long and tedious path of a convoluted explanation.

The director then clearly advised that they should use the complicated way because that's how you get published: not because you're clever, but because your solutions sound complicated.

It resonates perfectly with your comment and it's an unfortunate reality that most people don't bother for beautiful solutions and praise complicated processes. That's how we neded up with bureaucracy, probably :D

dfhgdfghdfgdf4• 1 month ago

One of those days, however, you come up with another of your elegant, simple solutions and it actually replaces a 150K LoC monstrosity with either a 1K script or, even better, with nothing as a simple shift in perspective or process obsoletes it completely.

In the long run, IME, you'll be recognized either by management or your peers if you keep doing that over and over again.

mrheosuper• 1 month ago

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity"

chorizo• 1 month ago

In academia that translates to, the more senior the faculty member, the easier the talk is to understand.

t435623• 1 month ago

On the other hand, I don't help people with their computer problems anymore because I've found that the more difficult the problem, the longer it takes me to rescue their data or whatever the less impressed they are. The more miraculous the save the more likely they are to tell me the story about their nephew who solved a trivial issue instantly as if to point out that I didn't.

robocat• 1 month ago

Things I won't work with: printers.

nomel2• 1 month ago

Yeap. Managers perceive complexity by how personally confused they are. I'm late in my career, and I'm realizing I wasted so many man years trying to make code clean, user friendly, and maintainable, when that code was never read by another person again and forgotten 15 minutes after it was released, then used for years. This is why I think AI is coming for our jobs much sooner than many people think: clean code, separation of concerns, maintainability, etc, all the things we spend the most time on, have never actually been valued. "Good enough" is fine, and keeps management happy. And, if something does pop up, AI can patch it, even if with spaghetti, just like fucking that ass at work.

hedora• 1 month ago

Two counter-examples:

- Arnold bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that would have been perfect for covid response, but the next governor didn’t want to pay 1% the fleet cost per year to maintain it, so he scrapped it.

- Under Obama, SARS v1 was stopped by US health workers that Trump fired because it was a “bad deal”. In the absence of that team, we got SARS v2, which was renamed to COVID 19.

There’s also the related category of “never blamed for fixing problems poorly, creating even bigger problems”.

Thanks to 9/11, plane cockpits can now be locked from the inside. Now, we have examples of commercial passenger airline pilots locking the doors and committing mass-murder-suicide by plane crash.

For some reason, these stories don’t make the news.

arcanemachiner• 1 month ago

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

senectus1• 1 month ago

sounds like my day to day job experience.

mdmabatj• 1 month ago

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

keyle• 1 month ago

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

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

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

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

kshacker3• 1 month ago

lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage people since you need to build their careers.

I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need to present to directors not because they need to know, but because your managers have a quota of N presentations per quarter, and if you back out, someone else needs to step up.

Needless to say my productivity reduces by half and sometimes to almost zero during the week or fortnight of presentations every quarter.

bruce5113• 1 month ago

You define "productivity" as coding.

The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support, coding, whatever".

Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they want.

I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread). Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less frustrated.

markvdb• 1 month ago

It's a serious problem in this industry

s/in this industry//

ChicknNuggt2• 1 month ago

I feel that disconnect is everywhere, when the suits dont see anything and act on reports

al_borland4• 1 month ago

I think a good place to start is tracking all the proactive things being done and reporting them. At least then maybe someone will see why it’s quiet, because you’ve anticipated the problems and stopped them before they start.

When things come up with other teams, you’ll have a catalog of tasks that were done to show why you didn’t have the same issue. The work was done, just at a better time to avoid downtime.

qurren4• 1 month ago

start is tracking all the proactive things being done and reporting them

Speaking from experience, this does nothing. If you're at a company that is okay with average performers, then absolutely, 100%, fix all the bugs in advance, make the system rock solid and stable, prevent downtime, be a good engineer.

If on the other hand if you're at a company where 10% of people must get stack ranked and PIP, or at a company where "meets expectations" actually means you're going to get the stick, and you're supposed to be "redefining" expectations every year ... then yeah, don't do anything preventative. The optics are better when you take the 3am on-call and fix the issue (that you secretly knew in the first place would happen some time in the future in your coworker's code, and already knew how to fix -- but don't actually fix it until it surfaces). Be the savior that the VPs praise in the next meeting, that's your insurance against the PIP.

They set the rules of the game, you just play the game. The rules were their choice. They could have chosen different rules.

HerbManic4• 1 month ago

This thinking eventually results in The Scream Test. When the screams come as a system fails that is when they act on it.

Alas, for many parts of society there is a large amount of people that would rather be reactive than proactive. It means it is easier today but harder long term.

esafak• 1 month ago

Track leading indicators, pricing them if possible.

kamaal• 1 month ago

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

Given the whole point of management is to work to ensure their own survival and growth, it would in their interest to kill genuine competition when its coming up.

Who wants to raise their new competition and lose to them, no one!

dchevell• 1 month ago

By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.

Building the right incentives around that can be tricky, those incentives need to ensure the highest levels of management aren't themselves disincentivising their directs & their departments from surfacing pain & problems - but it's also pretty common for people to mask those signals purely out of a well-intentioned desire to help. It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.

Too many companies ground their performance incentives & processes around oversimplified ideas that don't match the reality of human behaviour

antonvs• 1 month ago

The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have incompetent organizations.

thelastgallon3• 1 month ago

+10,000%

Often, 'leaders' make mistakes and people below suffer the consequences. It is important to let these leaders deal with the pain caused by their decisions from their cluelessness about how things work.

locknitpicker• 1 month ago

By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.

I don't think that's it. Emergent problems require attention and action from leadership, who in turn can make the problem visible to higher ups. This creates signal, and positive feedback when the problem is fixed or mitigated.

If the problem doesn't exist to begin with, there is no signal. Managers don't get to show their fast-acting skills, and there are no heroics to speak of.

So ultimately poorly maintained and managed projects who deliver fixes for problems of their own doing create a perverse incentive, whereas no one is lauded or promoted for doing normal day-to-day things.

HlessClaudesman2• 1 month ago

The Dunning Kruger effect suggests that the people who caused the pain are also those least likely to feel it.

Forgeties792• 1 month ago

Honestly? I’m just super direct with the exec team now after trying to do this dance. Obviously this is not allowed at every company, I’m just lucky to be at a place where the company culture allows for this.

I’ll ask for something preventative or that otherwise hardens our systems. They ask “is it a need?” and I’ll say something like “we can function without, but that means we have a 5-10% chance in the next 6mo of having a major failure and embarrassing ourselves in front of a live audience in the thousands as well as our client.” They then decide how much that risk is worth to them, and whatever they decide is kind of out of my hands at that point. If the thing I warned them of comes because they didn’t pay for it, I can point to the receipts (though I’ve never had to, we’re small enough people remember those conversations).

60% of the time they just get what I need maybe? But ultimately it’s about CYA. Tell them what’s up, tell them what the solution is, tell them what the consequences are if they don’t do the solution, and make them decide.

Again this obviously depends on company culture and structure, but I can’t imagine on the only person who can do this!

friendzis3• 1 month ago

If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.

At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot, but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they learn techniques minimizing probability of touching hot stuff even by accident. By the time one reaches twenty or so, the only times a person burns themselves is really by being way too reckless.

Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organization isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.

Should we accept that management as a whole is in general more clueless than your average teenager? The "learning opportunity" should, ideally, happen exactly once, realistically once in a very rare while.

It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.

You are conflating two things here, I guess. Yes, some "problems" are not worth to be fixed proactively or at all, but that has very little to do with group sizes, it's a "simple" cost-benefit tradeoff. As groups grow the left hands tend to become increasingly unaware of what the right is doing and that is the primary reason why we have management class in the first place.

The problem OP raises is attention span of the metaphorical gold fish in the management layers. Even if a department does everything in their power to communicate impending problems, do risk weighed cost-benefit analyses, get proactive treatments pre-approved by higher management, the same higher management forgets the risks and costs savings once they have been mitigated, effectively incentivizing firefighting. Some teams gradually fall into eternal firefighting and burn out, others start manufacturing fires to get rewarded. The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart.

nilamo• 1 month ago

"You knew there was a problem, and didn't fix it? You're here because I don't know programming. Fired."

I think we've worked with very different kinds of people...

gamerDude• 1 month ago

I feel like this is a cultural symptom and something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare. Basically we treat solving problems as amazing rather than preventing problems. You get rewarded if you treat a sickness instead of keeping a healthy person healthy.

This is the same thing. We need to reward things never going wrong as a society since this is pervasive.

bonsai_spool2• 1 month ago

something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare

Respectfully, the solution is don't smoke, exercise, eat well, sleep, avoid stressors... These aren't easy problems but their solution isn't at the individual patient level and is a simple question of capital and political will.

The 'hope' envisages a product to temporize the solution while extracting large payments.

warumdarum• 1 month ago

Car industry best practices

pbreit• 1 month ago

Since it's entirely possible (extremely likely?) the "problem" would never materialize, this is quite reasonable.

__patchbit__• 1 month ago

SpaceX almost has a full grip on the planetary consciousness extinction problem.

moezd• 1 month ago

Managers will let you get away with anything if you time your reports correctly. They also don't want to sit in meetings where they are reminded of better outsourcing alternatives and they chose to dogfeed instead.

We've become too comfortable, since actual toil is no longer seen in the company: Manufacturing is overseas, customer support is overseas, logistics is an afterthought with established guarantees. Thus we want the mild weather and smooth meetings. If your engineering team is too smooth, maybe you should already branch out to help other related but "struggling" teams to get your hands dirty and noticed.

renegade-otter• 1 month ago

Ah, yes - the person who comes in at 7AM and gets shit done by 11 is a slacker, and the one in the office just doing nothing after 6PM is the hard worker. Same thing.

You can't fix this. Out of sight, out of mind. It is hard-wired into us. It's all about the optics, and will always be.

atoav4• 1 month ago

I run the media tech at an university solo. Needless to say I am underfunded. But more importantly, the infrastructure was underfunded too. I made it my first policy to also report near misses up the chain with their full implications, e.g. a list of events that we would not have been able to make.

E.g. that time a central media controls power supply broke down which would have made using one of the most prestigious rooms impossible. I fixed it myself by swapping in a spare power supply from a used unit, then went on to remind them twice a year that we are now living on borrowed time and I take no responsibilities if a fault I predict to happen and get no funds to fix will in fact happen. 4 years later I got the funds.

Having stuff costs money. Everybody wants to invest funds once, but nobody wants to keep paying for maintenance.

maccard• 1 month ago

It's a serious problem in this industry

It’s not a problem in this industry, it’s a problem everywhere.

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

You mean the engineers who are causing the chaos you’re complaining about?

Engineers aren’t some magic group of people who know better than others - we’re just as fallible as other people.

dfhgdfghdfgdf4• 1 month ago

I believe it's a problem in most industries and even humanity in general. I don't believe it's a business problem at all.

Heroes are lauded even if they solve problems they themselves are the cause of - which is conveniently either forgotten or denied - or they are solving non-issues that are deemed important by the ignorami-class. Politics, for example, is utterly dominated by this dynamic.

It's the first instinct: let the expert run the show. However, one of the (many) ways to let a complex project fall apart completely is to hand over full control to engineers. I'm one myself, but I know what I'm good at and what not. Dunning-Kruger is often mentioned in these discussions, but don't forget it also applies to engineers that often lack any management or leadership experience of any appreciable kind. They vastly overestimate their ability to handle management and organization-wide issues and tend to not only miss the forest for the trees but actually miss the trees for the leaves.

"Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan actually mentions how proper management was crucial to their success. It's a detail that's frequently conveniently forgotten by the engineers who think themselves better than the "suits". For the record, I don't claim engineers are the primary problem, but it's not just management's either. Quotes like "who holds the company standing" and "who understands how to double click" are enormous smells and IMO make quite clear what's happening here.

I don't have ready-made solutions unfortunately, but I do wish we would look further than "it's the suits". It's a systemic, human problem that I believe is a natural result of operating under informational constraints and, very human, cognitive biases on all sides.

fabianholzer2• 1 month ago

Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.

ForgotIdAgain• 1 month ago

I guess the point of view is that if a department is well running, it means it is overressourced. So you reduce the ressources until it's breaking point, just enough for it to not fail. A jaded service manager told me it was part of its official training: if the clients was too satisfied that meant that human ressources were wasted on them, so he had to spin plates between clients. I guess it was economically optimal.

eloisant• 1 month ago

This is a short-term view approach and can really hurt a company on the long term.

It's also why US car companies are a wreck.

mrweasel• 1 month ago

At a previous job the CEO/owner had the idea that you'd get some percentage of any cost saving your could find as a bonus. Something like 20% of the savings for the first year.

My colleague in the IT department had one idea, replace our commercial certificates with Let's Encrypt and drop the EV requirement. In total he'd stand to get a bonus of a little over €2000. He never got the money, because things like that was part of his job apparently.

eru4• 1 month ago

Wow, that's pretty silly. 2000 Euros is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, and it would have showed that the policy was sincere.

palata• 1 month ago

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

I disagree with the implied idea here that "engineers are better managers". The solution is to have good management, not to assume that "engineers are better managers". I have seen good and bad managers, and in both groups there were engineers and non-engineers.

t435623• 1 month ago

Engineers may not be better managers but it's not easy to really manage something you don't have any insight in.

netfortius• 1 month ago

In my 35+ years in IT, the "hero attitude" was the one in the top three I most hated traits in a person working with or for me. And talking about traits, I considered crucial to always have in my teams a "saboteur" engineer - the one who thoght, found, come up with all the way we could break a design, service, infra components, app, etc., when all the others were designing or operating for perfect or normal conditions.

abby3010• 1 month ago

Love the "saboteur" approach. I honestly want to be one my own career in IT, but as you have rightfully conveyed, "hero attitude" is what gets you visibility!

pimlottc• 1 month ago

Genuine heroism - a willingness to step up when needed - isn't a bad thing in itself. But /needing/ a hero just to function means the system is fundamentally broken. Maybe it's a bad process, maybe it's understaffing, maybe it's neglected maintenance, maybe it's a lack of contingency planning. But there's no reason everyone can't go home at 5 PM every night and still get things done.

RA_Fisher2• 1 month ago

Econometricians can solve it, bc we can create rigorous models that map causal inputs to output.

It’s extremely advanced technology, though, and most CEOs would rather rent seek / camp than give up some decision-making power (and very few are even aware it’s possible).

brianjlogan• 1 month ago

Do you have any good sources for this I'd be interested in learning more

oliver236• 1 month ago

could an AI product solve this?

order-matters2• 1 month ago

itemize the problems you are preventing

"Accounted for X situation" "Added gaurdrails to protect against Y"

When working as a business analyst i have to do this sort of thing all hte time or else id get no credit for half my work

akudha• 1 month ago

Isn’t this a universal problem though, not just software industry? Even at home, if one kid just does his thing quietly but another kid is difficult, what do we say? “John has his problems but he is trying, we gotta encourage him”. While his brother gets no praise or attention for just doing his thing quietly without fuss.

When things run smoothly, very few people notice. When things break, everyone notices

mmsimanga• 1 month ago

As a middle child this rings true for me.

pirates• 1 month ago

when you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.

_carbyau_• 1 month ago

I thought that was where the phrasing:

"John! Why can't you be more like your brother?!"

comes from.

swiftcoder• 1 month ago

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

This is a very game-able system, and I'd wager a decent amount that any senior engineers on those teams know exactly what they are doing. In a lot of (broken, but aren't they all) management structures, it's better to be seen to swoop in with the save than to quietly fix it ahead of time.

And if your management is structuring rewards like this, it leads to your seniors anticipating a bunch of these failures, lining up 90% of the fix before hand, so that they can jump on the oncall escalation with a 100% "Hail Mary" of a fix...

smrtinsert• 1 month ago

Which they should. I've been lucky enough to work at places that had great non-technical managers that promoted based on great execution, as well as highly technical managers that also promoted based on great execution.

Now I'm at the other kind of place and it sucks. They'll fire the performative engineers though during layoff season. It's almost like they like playing politics until it really matters.

eldenbishop• 1 month ago

Same. I watched a manager fail upwards till he practically ran the entirety of engineering. All his projects failed, got expanded and restarted with more budget and more devs until he ran everything. Meanwhile the teams that actually wrote working services got their budgets frozen and lost headcount.

erelong• 1 month ago

So let's create moments or days of observance to make people aware of preventative measures taken

al_borland4• 1 month ago

A moment of silence to appreciate the silence the proactive measures gave us.

alok-g• 1 month ago

I align as such.

Then we soon see non-technical people start leading the same, pushing for some people to be recognized for this every sprint. Meaningless recognition starts coming in. The process fades out in just a couple weeks.

The problem is there are these people in the mix, often leading, who do not understand.

Guestmodinfo• 1 month ago

Human civilization runs on personal sacrifices but money bags will never care about that.

N_Lens• 1 month ago

Good thing we’re converting human civilization into money bags at maximum speed, then. Solves all problems elegantly.

nxy• 1 month ago

Very true! Along with it comes with peace/quietness at work so it’s not too bad.

sublinear• 1 month ago

Making critical decisions without oversight is just as bad, or maybe worse.

If you frame it this way in a meeting, you will get the attention you want. Don't say I didn't warn you because that comes with a lot of scrutiny you might not want.

ChicknNuggt2• 1 month ago

This is exactly the problem with the nature prevention. When it's well done, it seems like nothing was done.

HerbManic4• 1 month ago

When Covid started, our local government was very clear from the start in saying "If people think we have over reacted, then that means we have done a good job."

Alas, that doesn't always fly with the populace.

teiferer4• 1 month ago

Trouble is that it is not always true either. You can legitimately overreact and in hindsight it can be hard to distinguish between these two things.

Plus, even if you did overreact, that can still be the better side to have erred on, in moderation.

dang• 1 month ago

Related. Others?

Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693 - Feb 2024 (424 comments)

Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened (2001) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820 - Jan 2015 (50 comments)

tjmc• 1 month ago

This is why I'll never be a fire protection engineer

smath• 1 month ago

I'm looking for some data -- if anyone has it -- on the fraction of companies that are led (CEO) by a technical person, over the years/decades. I have the (anecdotal) impression that this fraction has been falling (stories like Boeing), but it would be cool to support or refute this with hard data. Anyone know where to find/assemble something like this? Also, if this trend is true, then why?

fsagx• 1 month ago

If this has been true, perhaps at some point the pendulum will swing back the other way. BTW the current CEO of Boeing is a mechanical engineer.

https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/kelly-ortberg

falsemyrmidon• 1 month ago

After decades of infamous quality drops that have impacted their reputation and finally bottom line under non technical CEOs.

doctorwho42• 1 month ago

I don't have the data, but I think a good case study is the company MITRE.

Originally it was engineers from the top down, but over the last 15-20 years those leaders with engineering backgrounds have retired and been replaced by non-engineer MBA's. And the more I look around, the more I see that as a common trope is the US.

didgetmaster• 1 month ago

We all learned this back in first grade. The kids that behaved in class and did their homework did not command most of the teacher's time and effort. It was the problem children who refused to follow the rules and needed constant praise for every bit of actual effort that they put into their studies; that got the teacher's attention.

hattmall• 1 month ago

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, is how I always heard it phrased.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

This is the real problem with performance reviews in companies, which then feeds into opportunities, promotions and compensation. It's just a popularity contest. And this is particularly harmful to people who are neurodivergent, particularly if they're on the autism spectrum, because neurotypical people, who end up making all these decisions, view such people negatively for literally no reason.

You could spin up a team of 6 engineers and have them go away and try some greenfield project. They could come up back in 6 months having shipped nothing. Which of these descriptions fits the facts?

1. The team learned a lot and ultimately decided there was no product-market fit and decided it was best to reallocate resources elsewhere. The learnings from that project will help a whole bunch of other projects across the division; and

2. They failed to ship and get subpar performance ratings for having no impact.

The answer is... both. Or either. How you are treated will depend on how you are viewed by your management chain and that's a social function. We've all encountered people who never shut up about how hard their job is. Often they end up solving problems that they created, often by not listening to anyone that those problems would occur. And they get credit for it.

You could say to people who anticipate problems to stop because it gets you nowhere. Let people fail. If only it worked that way. Instead you'll get blamed for not seeing a problem someone else created because you're viewed as competent but you aren't liked through no fault of your own.

Google seems to be the posterchild for a company that briefly solved this problem and then forgot what made them successful. I am referring to Project aristotle [1], which ultimately determined that psychological safety was the key ingredient in a team's success.

Now amplify all of this with constant rounds of layoffs where the environment isn't just for pay bumps and opportunities but where the cost of failing is losing your income. What you've created is an environment where office politics is everything.

[1] https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/

sandeepkd• 1 month ago

Its really hard to measure effectiveness, problem becomes even harder when a non-engineering person has the job to measure effectiveness of a engineering person.

On other hand. for software engineering some of the signals that can be used to measure such a management itself can be

1. On call requirement, outages and team burnout - A well written software should not require on-calls from the dev team

2. Ask them about the "concrete" roadmap for next 6 months to a year - Absence of concrete items is a bad sign

whatever1• 1 month ago

I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.

HerbManic4• 1 month ago

Just remember, the power grid fails in theory but works in practice.

m463• 1 month ago

I think of electric vehicle fires and jet airliner crashes.

Also, telsa self-driving. yes, we know about the greatly publicized accidents, or the tweets of the founder, but the avoided incidents not so much.

thx674• 1 month ago

This is where the industry made and continues to make mistakes wrt autonomous driving.

They should be able to quantitatively say how many crashes were reduced, avoided and spotted. The autonomous safety system should be running all the time and it should detect not only issues with primary vehicle but it should also catalog issues it sees in other vehicles in its vicinity.

We shouldn't have gotten AD before we got automated crash avoidance.

tikhonj• 1 month ago

Counterpoint: I absolutely give credit to Sonic for being a great ISP and recommend them to everyone. I got my parents to switch when Sonic finally rolled out to their neighborhood.

If online comments are anything to go by, I'm not alone.

If you're in the Bay Area and you can get a Sonic fiber connection, I would highly recommend them over AT&T/Comcast/etc.

JimsonYang• 1 month ago

Its either end of the spectrum-you do the best job(top 10%) or your everyone else.

If you only do middle of the pack(for one reason or another-cost, talent, etc) you become incentivized to cause problems then fix it.

Thus a net negative to society

*Also recommend sonic-their pricing and service is top tier

jesterson• 1 month ago

Well in a way you do. They send you a fine bill every month and you do credit some of your allegedly hard earned bucks.

blitzar• 1 month ago

I never gave credit to my electricity company

That's what the moneys for ...

everyone• 1 month ago

The jokes around Y2K being a nothing burger always annoy me. Nothing happened because a lot of talented people worked their asses off fixing it.

throw0101c2• 1 month ago

Aka:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox

teiferer4• 1 month ago

My favorite example is the introduction of speed limit on some accident-ridden stretch of the Autobahn north of Berlin. After introducing the speed limit, the accident numbers went down dramatically. What did the local administration decide? Remove the speed limit again -- cause there were no accidents anymore!

cm11• 1 month ago

I'd guess a lot of people here consider this "reality" at this point. Has anyone come up with a response—not a fix for the company or leaders behaving this way, but a response for their own path?

Did you change from a quiet diligent one to manipulating and playing the game (now that you know the game)? Did you go from quiet and diligent to quiet and not diligent (why do good work when meh work does the trick)? Another path?

staplers• 1 month ago

https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

sfn42• 1 month ago

I just do my job to the best of my ability. I have to change jobs every couple years anyway to get proper pay bumps, so I don't really care what the higher ups think of me. The people near me are who I'll use as references and they generally know I'm great at what I do.

tinyhouse• 1 month ago

This is very true and applies for everything in life.

throwawa1• 1 month ago

Its called doing your job.

Steve163842• 1 month ago

That depends. It might be going above-and-beyond your job.

protocolture• 1 month ago

Depends on the business.

When everyone is technical to some degree, I find that credit for technical rescue is forthcoming.

thelastgallon3• 1 month ago

This is how people get promoted at work. They break something, it escalates and gets visibility, emails sent to executives. Now, they 'fix' it, many thank yous from everyone for a job well done. Another version of this is delay the work you are supposed to do a long time back and let it gain visibility. Executives are blind, they can't see work being done by people who take ownership and get shit done before it becomes a problem. However, executive will remember the name of the person who breaks shit and 'saves' the day.

doublerabbit• 1 month ago

The sociopathic backhand. Someone breaks it, blames you, drags your name through the mud exacerbating the issue, goes to "fix it" yet makes it worse because of their incompetence. They continue to cuss you out for it all while licking the arse of the executive. "No, we better not let doublerabbit touch that", "I don't think they're a team player". All while it was my infrastructure.

And people ask why I hate humans.

CalChris• 1 month ago

People don’t get credit for fixing problems that do happen. Maybe possibly in a sales scenario where your fix unblocked the sale. Otherwise nada.

insumanth• 1 month ago

Boring is Better

ananthrk• 1 month ago

"Titanic effect" - No captain gets credit for preventing a disaster!

inejge• 1 month ago

Couldn't help noticing:

In other words, it’s not just a tool problem, any more than it’s a human resources problem or a leadership problem. Instead it is a systemic problem [...]

Shades of an LLMism, a bit padded, a quarter of a century ago. These days someone could easily give it a stink-eye. I'm sure that training has ingested this along with countless similar examples.

teiferer4• 1 month ago

That should really be a cautionary tale for everybody accusing everyone of LLM manufacturing texts. Many people write like that. The self-censoring nowadays to try to avoid sounding like an LLM is really sth we need to grow out of.

SteveGerencser2• 1 month ago

I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.

I couldn't even get my own dad to pay for network support for his company since he would never pay my rate for anyone no matter what. After 2 other people failed to solve his problem I fixed it in 15 minutes and then he "really" didn't want to pay because it only took 15 minutes.

I was very good at what I did but got no appreciation for keeping things from breaking, only for fixing things after they broke. Marketing paid better, and I could point at real world numbers daily and justify my pay. I don't like it anywhere near as much, but at least it gets more respect than any other IT work I did.

pulse7• 1 month ago

I'm sorry your dad didn't respect your IT work...

menaerus2• 1 month ago

If I move out a bit of my circle, where people do all kinds of work, I'd say that there's generally a stigma on the "IT" workers. Moreover the stigma is there even within the IT company/industry itself, where sales, marketing, non-engineering parts of management, and other similar types of supporting roles also look down on the engineering. And this unfortunately includes family members too. I learned that people are mostly envy but when you're surrounded by many it can become overwhelming - numerous times I heard phrases like "oh, you're bricklayers of a modern age" ... like wtf

sevenzero• 1 month ago

Idk I joined the field only like 5 years ago. Prior to knowing about programming I had a lot of respect for programmers and tech as it was this magic world to me. After having joined the field the magic is completely gone and I don't want to talk to programmers irl anymore because of how many insufferable people I've met so far. The parts where I've got credit are the simple things, fix printer, fix computer issue A,B and C or small apps like an ad free Sudoku for android which I have built for my friends. The parts I don't get credit for are the parts I get paid for. But I can see that in many industries, as soon as money is involved people are less thankful because they expect you to fulfill your part of the contract. Generally people not knowing shit about tech think that devs sit in HO all day working only 30 minutes. AI didn't help that image.

atoav4• 1 month ago

On your dad:

"This is what my regular customers pay me. If I hired one of my friends or relatives I see it as my duty to pay them at least what they are worth, this is the way you raised me."

I believe this to be true btw. If someone is really your friend, you want them to do well and that means you pay what they usually get or you don't bother them and get someone else.

SteveGerencser2• 1 month ago

I agree. I have never taken a discount from a friend or family member for work that they do for a living. It never made sense to me how anyone would want to underpay someone in their family or close circle of friends. I do however, go out of my way to make sure that they are charging what they are really worth.

Tsarp2• 1 month ago

Ian Rush said it best: "It's best being a striker. Miss five, score the winner, you're a hero. The goalkeeper plays a blinder, lets one in, and he's a villain."

Every place I've worked rewards the firefighter over the person who made sure nothing ever caught fire. And the worst part is the math is obvious to everyone except the people who set the incentives.

joelthelion• 1 month ago

How would you set the incentives, though? Almost by definition, it's hard to reward things that aren't visible.

Note that there is also the flip side of the coin, people who spend all their time worrying about things that never happen, so it's not like you can just reward a defensive attitude things are more complicated than that.

Tsarp2• 1 month ago

I dont have an answer and you are mostly correct. I received some advice based on this that made sense which was to pick the roles in your career that naturally made it easier. Sales, PM, Dev etc and not support, Devops, escalation management, CSM etc.

an0malous• 1 month ago

One basic example is not counting bugs as points in your ticket tracker. At my last job I had coworkers whose velocity was almost double everyone else’s but it was because they kept deploying and then fixing their own bugs.

forshaper2• 1 month ago

The equivalent of 'days since last injury' bonuses is the first method that comes to mind, until you consider that this would mean people would be more likely to hide things going wrong.

So then many things are to rely on executive culture, and an executive who will walk the line and get their info from people at the bottom is like a unicorn. That won't scale, but it does work if you do have such an executive. Naturally they would need a basic understanding of how supply is created in their firm.

Yet there is something. Toyota Hiluxes and Honda Super Cubs got popular due to maintenance ease. AK-47s. Miele vacuums. Older Thinkpads.

What measures would make the human equivalent visible?

dilyevsky• 1 month ago

I dont think this comparison really works. Firefighter would be goalie or a defender and like you said in sports they are less appreciated/compensated for a simple reason - usually they don’t bring in views. There are exceptions ofc like Pippen or Seaman

latentframe• 1 month ago

Prevention is hard to sustain because the success is invisible : nobody notice the defects delays or crises that never happened

WalterBright• 1 month ago

People do get credit for making things that "just work".

agumonkey• 1 month ago

And people often get credit for fixing issues they partially created.

Human groups work on shallow signalling and distributed confusion.

doener• 1 month ago

Since Covid nearly everyone in Germany knows this saying: "There is no glory in prevention."

mihaaly• 1 month ago

But the same person can get paid for it. So there is an incentive to create, or at least pretend problems.

coldtea2• 1 month ago

Pendatically speaking, people do get credit for fixing problems that never happened.

E.g. if the problems are quantifiable and there's a record, like dropping homicides from 100 per year to 20 per year in a city. Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood.

For an one-off problem, it depends on how clear the path to the problem is. An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixing big electrical issues in the installation, would be appreciated, even if the accidents didn't happen.

dormento• 1 month ago

Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood.

People are gonna criticize by saying "see? it was an overreaction to the problem, since there's not been many homicides at all!", when in fact the homicides were prevented by fixing the original problem. Same way with the electrician: "how much are you gonna charge again? And you're charging for a fix to a problem that didn't happen yet? Nah, I'll call you when the problem happens".

Its maddening.

Steve163842• 1 month ago

An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixing big electrical issues in the installation, would be appreciated, even if the accidents didn't happen.

Not if nobody knew he'd fixed it.

coldtea2• 1 month ago

Electricians are no celebrities for people in general to know what they fixed or didn't fix.

The person / building owner who comissioned them to do the check, will know what they fixed or what they didn't fix, from the report they give.

afisxisto• 1 month ago

I remember finding a comment in the first codebase I ever worked on professionally in my first ever job.

It read "This fixes a bug that hasn't happened yet".

It seemed really smart at first, but later I learned that the developer that added that code also had a pattern of appending spaces to the start and end of user input and comparing the length to 2 to determine whether the value was empty or not...

So I'm fairly sure "that hasn't happened yet" was probably more a case of "that I personally haven't introduced unnecessarily yet" :)

alkonaut• 1 month ago

This is especially nice in the age of AI. I (the graybeard senior developer) does all the risky refactoring. I can take a performance issue and turn it into six regressions in half a day ($100). Then everyone is impressed when I let Opus fix these regressions in 20 minutes and $2 worth of AI.

No one notices when you cut 20% of some expensive process but cause no regressions.

awesome_dude• 1 month ago

We know that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled, and we don't want the wheels to come off, so we need the wheel to squeak loud enough to be heard ;)

jdw64• 1 month ago

Avengers get the glory, preventers get no story.

arkensaw• 1 month ago

I feel obliged to point out Stanslav Petrov, who absolutely got credit for fixing a problem that never happened. Granted it's a very extreme case.

ekjhgkejhgk• 1 month ago

Credit only in fame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#Aftermath

Petrov underwent intense questioning by his superiors about his judgment. Initially, he was praised for his decision.[2] Colonel-general Yuri Votintsev, the then-commander of the Soviet Air Defense's Missile Defense Units, who was the first to hear Petrov's report of the incident (and the first to reveal it to the public in the 1990s), states that Petrov's "correct actions" were "duly noted".[2] Petrov himself states he was initially praised by Votintsev and promised a reward,[2][22] but recalls that he was also reprimanded for improper filing of paperwork because he had not described the incident in the war diary.[22][23]
Petrov has said that he was neither rewarded nor punished for his actions.[24] According to Petrov, he received no reward because the incident and other bugs found in the missile detection system embarrassed his superiors and the scientists who were responsible for it, so that if he had been officially rewarded, they would have had to be punished.[2][24][22][23] He was reassigned to a less sensitive post,[23] took early retirement (although he emphasized that he was not "forced out" of the army),[22] and suffered a nervous breakdown.[23]

pedroza_alex• 1 month ago

The same article points out that he received at least £26k in awards. It could be argued that the reward isn't proportional to the magnitude of his actions, but it exists.

thx674• 1 month ago

His page links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls which is a harrowing thing to read. We keep rolling the dice with no changes to the game.

t435623• 1 month ago

I recognise almost every aspect of this document - it's exactly what's so intractable about the software business. This is why I think you do need to do some programming every now and again no matter what your level is because otherwise you cannot see what's happening and you'll be tempted into the "lazy developer" attribution.

markus_zhang• 1 month ago

The title reminds me of an interesting ancient Chinese anecdote. And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals recently (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo).

King Wen of Wei asked Bian Que:

“Of you three brothers, all physicians, who is the finest in the healing art?”

Bian Que replied:

“My eldest brother is the finest; my second brother comes next; I, Bian Que, am the least of the three.”

King Wen said:

“May I hear why?”

Bian Que answered:

“My eldest brother sees illness in the spirit, before it has taken shape, and removes it unseen; therefore his name is known only within our household.

My second brother treats illness when it is but a hair’s breadth from appearing; therefore his name does not travel beyond our village lane.

As for me, Bian Que: I pierce the blood vessels, administer strong medicines, and cut open the flesh. Thus, by such visible acts, my name has spread among the lords.”

tom2026hn• 1 month ago

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

ashirviskas• 1 month ago

How many euros or kilograms is it?

sorokod• 1 month ago

Can you share the source of the anecdote? I tried to find it in Zhuangzi and was not successful.

vitus• 1 month ago

Best I can tell, it's originally from Heguanzi: https://ctext.org/he-guan-zi/shi-xian

valbaca• 1 month ago

or a simpler version: "A stitch in time saves nine...but I charge by the stitch"

notJim• 1 month ago

literally one of the main reasons america spends so much on healthcare

Npovview• 1 month ago

Can we measure preventive medicines or projects which have been designed with care from the beginning? Can we have metrics and measure/compare projects over lifetime production bugs?

This reminds me of perverse Amazon practice of hiring people only to fire them to meet quota. This could have been avoided if they measured the average lifetime of hired individuals. If they were fired the very next firing round, it means the process is broken. Ideally a fixed percentage of freshly hired developers should have moved upward displacing senior slacking developers.

red-iron-pine• 1 month ago

And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals recently (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo).

the article is from June 2024. this is "recently"?

_caw• 1 month ago

Yes? Toyota has been producing vehicles since the 30s, so two years ago is quite recent within context.

sirlaser• 1 month ago

"My eldest brother prevents bugs from appearing before they ever arise, so his skills are only known to the dev team he's on.

"My second brother casually fixes bugs as soon as they appear, so his skills are known to the entire tech department.

"As for me, I rush around everyday putting out fires everywhere, so everyone in the company knows of me."

cameronh90• 1 month ago

As Futurama said, when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

teddyh2• 1 month ago

They stole that from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 17:

  When the Master governs, the people
  are hardly aware that he exists.
  Next best is a leader who is loved.
  Next, one who is feared.
  The worst is one who is despised.

  If you don’t trust the people,
  you make them untrustworthy.

  The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
  When his work is done,
  the people say, “Amazing:
  we did it, all by ourselves!”

— <https://ttc.tasuki.org/section:17>

j3th9n• 1 month ago

The best hackers are the ones who never get caught.

matja• 1 month ago

Apt comic: https://www.workchronicles.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cure

-warren• 1 month ago

My time in IT has really oscillated between these two extremes:

- "Everything around is working just fine. What are we paying IT for?"

- "Everything is broken. What are we even paying IT for?"

Personally, I strive for the former rather than the latter; I like to say "If I do my job right, you never know I'm here." But that's what got me let go.

(and for karma's sake, I keep in touch with folks at the old company; it's an absolute crapshow. So I got that going for me; which is nice)

harimau777• 1 month ago

I had this problem at a previous job. I spent almost all of my time taking care of the behind the scenes administrative work (scheduling meetings, making sure that people had the information they needed to come into the meetings prepared, etc.). However, when performance review came around I was told that the only thing that they cared about was that I hadn't completed many story points because I was too busy keeping things from falling apart.

So I stopped doing all the administrative work and focused on just completing story points. A week or two later my manager asks the team "how come all of our meetings are falling apart now? We get into a meeting and no one knows what's going on."

projektfu4• 1 month ago

Like what would have happened to the 4077th MASH if Radar O'Reilly had been reassigned.

Sam6late• 1 month ago

Here is another take in s different context.I had a very bad manger who was credited earlier with causing several companies to go out of business while he was taking advantage of having worked for a FAANG company. He worked there for less than 6 months as a business development dude when the that big shot company was new in that market.After he joined us and when I was processing some payments I noticed that he was paying some people for 2 months ahead of their starting dates, it was some $20k.I notified him, and he corrected the date,then I was told by others in the department that my problem was that I should not 'interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake'. Eventually, the company got rid of him but it was after a very serious damage.

api• 1 month ago

Chernobyl instantly comes to mind. The giant problem with that particular RBMK design was known to a few people, but nobody fixed it, and if they had... we wouldn't even know, since it would be lost to history.

pugworthy• 1 month ago

This brings to mind Neil Rickert's "The Parable of the Two Programmers", which was published in the ACM SIG Software Engineering newsletter, January 1985.

https://dl.acm.org/action/showFmPdf?doi=10.1145%2F1012443 for the original, or https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro... for a reprint.

amelius• 1 month ago

This is why Apple never gets any credits.

nostrademons• 1 month ago

The headline is only half true. A more accurate rendition might be "Transactions don't happen because you fixed a problem that never occurred."

That illustrates the converse. People will absolutely try to avoid future problems if they are the ones that bear the consequences for them. Use birth control (or put your kid on it) so you don't have to raise another child for 20+ years. Don't hang out with that volatile "friend" who always seems to be having another crisis. Fix your roof so you don't lose the house. Don't go into debt because you're the one who will be paying interest on it.

But almost by definition, bearing the consequences of your own decisions implies that there's no transaction.

It's interesting and fitting that the article begins with a discussion of Toyota. People buy Toyotas because they want to avoid problems. The biggest selling point is reliability; a Toyota's value prop is that you can keep it for 20 years and you won't have unexpected things go wrong with it. Toyota has managed to turn this into a sales driver because they appeal to the self-interest of a buyer who will be living with the car for 10-20 years. There are thousands of individual decisions that Toyota makes to avoid problems with their cars, starting with a very conservative aversion to new technology or anything that is engineeringly risky. Each individual one is invisible to the customer, and often comes with significant costs in isolation. But because their sales driver is "be reliable at all costs" and they've ingrained that into the culture, they've built an organization that is willing to make these feature trade-offs for reliability.

Also, an interesting corollary is "Oftentimes, a good life is lived with few transactions."

Root_Access• 1 month ago

This is true but if you remove the need for credit then you can just get back to work and not have to create a category about it.

kouru225• 1 month ago

Hikaru Nakamura had a good comment on famous chess moves like this: All the famous chess moves are famous sacrifices, genius saves, and last minute checkmates, but when you plug the games into stockfish you find out that these scenarios only happened cause the players made a series of awful moves early on in the game

abustamam• 1 month ago

This is interesting because you can't prove you prevented something from happening. It never happened after all. Hank Green has an interesting video on preventative measures are often unsung, because how do you know?

https://youtu.be/ndeB_BpsRGk?is=03lR2DMyhfwkT3L-

Kids in Africa who would have otherwise died from measles, but didn't get measles in the first place because some people decided to fund and make vaccines and thousands of unnamed and unrecognized volunteers helped distribute and administer these vaccines...

These kids are alive and they don't even know that they wouldn't be alive if it weren't for some people they may never meet, and whose names they'll never know.

Also tangentially, reminds me of an excerpt of a book called The Trigger Effect I read as a kid, which said something along the lines of, when you use your car's brakes to prevent an accident, your life depends on whoever assembled the brakes and quality controlled them. You'll never know their name, and they'll never know that they saved your life.

AndrewChamp• 1 month ago

"When you things right, no one will ever know you did anything at all"

- Futurama

smolder• 1 month ago

Yeah, I have fixed issues that could have potentially destroyed the company I was working at. There was an instance of a lazily written script which just took user input for a file open. It could read sensitive files on the system because of lazy development. The other devs praised me for fixing it, but I didn't get any recognition comparable to the losses our company could have had if it got exploited.

thelastgallon3• 1 month ago

Doing nothing at work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442880

The first comment is spot on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496420: Time and time again at many companies, including well-reputed ones, I have seen that preventing issues gets you no recognition, but building a giant pile of kindling and then putting out the inevitable fire will get you recognition twice. Even in "good" orgs.

eskimobloood• 1 month ago

I wonder why the whole topic of system thinking comes (self-enforcing/balancing feedback loops etc.) only come up in older literature from the 80s til late 90s. Why did it become out of fashion with the start up culture.

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

Related Stories