Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
web.mit.edu131 points by sam_bristow 2 hours ago
131 points by sam_bristow 2 hours 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).
<insert IBM story about IT department cost cuts>
I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.
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.
The tragedy is that “nothing broke” looks like “nothing was done” to people far enough away from the system.
Things keep breaking - "What are we paying you for?"
Nothing ever breaks. - "What are we paying you for?"
Management can choose their burden.
I feel that disconnect is everywhere, when the suits dont see anything and act on reports
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.
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
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.
"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
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.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?
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.
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'.
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.
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?
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.
This is exactly the problem with the nature prevention. When it's well done, it seems like nothing was done.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The tech being obsolete is why Y2K was a smaller problem than it would have been otherwise. Most places were no longer running much COBOL code. But banks are famously slow to upgrade their tech, and for good reason much of the time, so most of the world's remaining COBOL code (and other code too, COBOL is just what I'm most familiar with, not that I'm all that familiar with it) was in banks and other financial institutions.
Like nobody gets credit for avoiding problems or unnecessary things/complexity altogether. In fact the opposite may happen.
This is why I'll never be a fire protection engineer
So let's create moments or days of observance to make people aware of preventative measures taken
A moment of silence to appreciate the silence the proactive measures gave us.
Very true! Along with it comes with peace/quietness at work so it’s not too bad.
Human civilization runs on personal sacrifices but money bags will never care about that.
Good thing we’re converting human civilization into money bags at maximum speed, then. Solves all problems elegantly.
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.
You might want to double check your dates on that SARS claim. Are you talking about the swine flu outbreak?
> 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.
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.
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.
sounds like my day to day job experience.
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