It's funny how the thankless jobs of quality assurance become so critical so quickly. And I mean that ironically of course.

To folks out there: do the important work, not the glamorous work, and you'll not only sleep well, but you might actually matter as well.

Well, I’m proud of him, too. Thank him for helping us return to the stars.

I hope he knows you are proud of him.

I love it when some company gets one of the engineers to do a demonstration, you know you got an actual engineer because it will be the worst sales pitch you ever received. They will tell you in excruciating detail all the problems with their product. Recognize and cherish these moments for what they are worth, despite the terrible presentation it is infinitely more valuable than yet another sales rat making untenable promises.

It is something to do with that being the engineers actual job, to find and understand the problems with the product. so when talking to a customer, that is what tends to come across, all the problematic stuff. The good stuff that works, not important to them.

I was just reading a great discussion about how "academics use qualifiers as to how confident they are in the information" and you can see similar trends in spaces like hacker news.

But using "uncertain" language seems unconvincing to people outside of these types of cultures.

Also of course the power dynamics.

PowerPoint actually fine

  - bad communication possible in any medium
  - pptx in NASA even today!
  - issue is managers/SMEs communication differences
    - issues with technical papers
      - long
      - boring
  - vs word, excel, pdf...

Manager/SME Differences

  - context vs conclusion 
  - tell a compelling story
    - but give away the ending FIRST 
  - inherent personality differences
  - motivations/incentives/mindsets

Learning from disasters

  - medium guides message and messenger
  - blame tool - binary choice?
  - presentation aide vs distributed technical artifact

Questions?

I think the problem is that most people, especially non-engineers, are over-selling and over-promising all the time. Being honest about risks, issues, and short-comings makes a project or product look bad in comparison.

The most feasible way to get X done is saying "X is a great option, the risks are managable, and it's fairly quick". Then, it will unexpectedly take a bit longer, plus some unforeseen trade-offs will need to be made.

> This isn't a failure of PowerPoint.

Agree and was going to say the same thing. Messages need to be created for a specific audience.

When I'm sending an email to non-tech mgrs that has a bunch of tech details like that slide, I typically separate more detailed stuff from the conceptual message:

Summary:

System performance is not good enough for go live.

Working on a few possible solutions.

Details (for those interested):

System x is connected to ...blah blah blah...

If nothing else it's quite hard/uncommon to print out a PowerPoint and read it carefully in a quiet room by yourself, I do this with written stuff all the time.

>if you want to be heard... and really understood ... you have to say things up front that come across as overly simple, controversial, and poorly-founded, and then you can reveal your analyses as people question you.

I question your premise. :J

I'm just kidding, that's interesting I'll have to think about applying that. I don't suppose that would translate over to blogging? The fear of course is that one makes a statement and the commentariat thinks the speaker is full of it for not having provided backup instead of questioning. Maybe it's dependent on what type of forum it is.

I feel that. I looked at the powerpoint from the post and I cringed because it looks just like the kind of thing I could have written, with half finished thoughts all over the place masquerading as something a decider could use...

Yah they buried the lead on this one. This foam is 100x bigger than our tests so this must be manually verified

“The medium is the massage”

If you haven't read it, I highly suggest you read Feynman's addendum to the Challenger disaster report:

https://www.nasa.gov/history/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

The words "a safety factor of three" will live with me for every day of my life.

> the few page grabs

The full report (2003 edition, low-res) is available on ResearchGate. It appears to be a lawful copy, uploaded by the author himself. Fascinating reading, indeed.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/208575160_The_Cogni...

Because the medium is not conducive to dense amount of technical information that readers are expected to use to make or understand decisions. Other similar mediums like a chalkboard were not singled out because the problem was identified with PowerPoint specifically. And it wasn't a choice of mediums all with similar problems, but slides vs papers. From the article,

> “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

Speaking of chalkboards, next time you have to give a presentation, bring a chalkboard and do your slides in realtime. Something about the visual show, auditory overload, and not least the novelty of the act makes it much more impactful and memorial than "another powerpoint that puts you to sleep"

White boards are... ok... better than powerpoint but still fail to sell it like a chalkboard does. I think it is the noise.

I think it's a lot harder to have this particular type of communications failure if you're writing on a chalkboard. Imagine trying to write out that whole slide, it would take forever. If you really did have to present that information on a chalkboard, you'd be significantly more likely to write something along the lines of:

"We checked the test data: possible to damage tiles significantly" "Foam that hit wing was way bigger than the tests"

Obviously you can miscommunicate via any medium, but I think the author's point here (which I agree with) is some mediums lend themselves to specific types of miscommunication.

Yeah, the choice to gloss over the point "our tests are not relevant" was a deliberate one. If it was in a paper you'd have big fancy graphs of the tests and you'd have to do your own work to compare the x axis against a mention of the actual scale in question in another paragraph. It's not as if they started with "Warning: even the 600X smaller bits we tested can damage the wing" and microsoft just kind of spontaneously grew a bunch of random stuff above the fold. It's a kind of chickenshit communication which you can do in any medium. The point they ought to be making is not dense or technical, it is so simple a child could understand.

The medium is the message.

PowerPoint gets used because it requires less effort from the audience. They sit back and zone out like couch potatoes. Scrap the PowerPoint and throw the technical report at the managers. Any of them who complain or otherwise don't read it are incompetent and should be fired on the spot.

the medium is the message

Tufte did make specific recommendations that one should prepare a real document that your audience can and should read, and that they would have in front of them during the meeting. I'm not sure how best to translate that to your API example.

THANK YOU. I've seen the velocity of the space shuttle quoted as the speed that the foam had when it hit Columbia's wing so many times, and it bugs the crap out of me.

This is mentioned in the article, and linked to.

Yeah, the problem here isn't Powerpoint, it's what it said. This is a case of shoot the messenger. Powerpoint doesn't hinder communication, it lets people think they understand when their actual knowledge is superficial and can easily be a case of the primrose path.

Tufte also had a lot to say about the Challenger disaster, which predates Powerpoint but not the visual display of information.

Found the chapter here: https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-ch...

The alternative is to try.

Apollo 13 probably seemed pretty hopeless. They didn't just say "sorry fellas, maybe you'll get lucky and make it, good luck."

The late great Bob Hoover said, "If you’re faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash as possible." You keep trying until you can't anymore.

Saying "well, maybe they'll survive," and not even telling them, is not the move when you have nearly a month to figure something out.

> There was actually an exercise done to work this out, at the direction of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB). [...] In the CAIB’s scenario, Atlantis would have launched with a four-person crew: two pilots, and two EVA mission specialists. [...]

> A Columbia rescue mission would have been the most monumentally difficult and epic space mission in history, and it would have required absolutely everything going right to bring the crew home safely. But NASA has shown time and again its ability to rise to the occasion and bring its formidable engineering and piloting expertise to bear. Instead, the worst instincts of the agency - to micromanage and engage in wishful thinking instead of clear-eyed analysis - doomed the crew.

https://www.quora.com/If-NASA-had-known-ahead-of-time-Columb...

A much more deeply researched article here:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...

The problem with sending up another shuttle is they hadn't actually fixed the underlying foam problem. If there was another foam strike on the rescue shuttle, now they have two craft in orbit with crew on that can't re-enter

They did a bunch of studies. While it was POSSIBLE to get a rescue shuttle up to them if they ignored a bunch of safety and refurbishment procedures, the sheer amount of complexities probably meant they would lose 2 shuttles and 2 crew.

One option would have been to place whatever high melting point metal tools they could spare into the hole, and freeze water around them to hold it in place. It also might have been possible to change the series of s-curves and other maneuvers done during re-entry, in order to lessen the heating on the left wing.

Which parts weren't reusable?

What would "proper testing" look like, to have caught and corrected the fatal design flaw?

The shuttle was about as reusable as the Falcon 9 is now. Though at vastly higher expense.

> As an engineer, that slide looks completely reasonable to me.

Then you shouldn't be in charge of communicating highly technical subject matter to decision makers, especially if lives are at stake.

There really should have been one large bold font slide saying “we have no test data for a piece of foam this size”.

Putting the fact that you don't actually have any remotely suitable test data buried at the bottom is reasonable??

The slide shown here is completely horrendous, even by 2003 standard. I've worked in a field as technical as this one for a long time, and this slide would not pass a review, even with people familiar with the content.

While it does not wash the responsibility of the executives, the engineers have also the responsibility to be clear in their communication

I can't remember the last time I saw a slide as mangled as the one in the article. It hurts my brain just reading it.

But you are right, most engineers would consider that reasonable, while complaining about the "muggles" that just don't get it.

As a Software Architect, one of my main responsibilities has been to take information presented like above and turn it into something that non-technical people can digest.

Being able to express a complex concept in simple terms is an invaluable skill.

I wish this was satire. The slide is full of spelling mistakes and all kinds of horrible communication. Even when I know it documents an issue that killed people I still struggle to read it. Only the bottom part hints at anything relevant.

> which it did adequately

What makes you think this, given the subsequent events?

"That's on them" is not acceptable for an engineer when lives are on the line. Part of your job is making people understand what they need to understand. If their lack of understanding means people die, then you need to do your job and figure out how to communicate effectively to the audience you have, not the audience you want.

I spent too much if my early career dealing with the consequences of bad decisions made on “good data”. If the presentation was so good why did they come to the wrong conclusions? It became part of my overall thesis that good design invites you to use a thing the proper way even if you failed to read the instructions.

You can’t force someone to think but you can force a lot of people not to, or you can make it difficult to avoid. It’s worth investing the energy into stacking the deck the right way.

They should have made it abundantly clear that they had no idea what was going to happen and that loss of the crew and shuttle was a real possibility, but I agree with you.

This slide was presented with a verbal talk track, and anyone who can't handle focusing on the topic because the slide is boring shouldn't be in a position of responsibility.

There's a near infinite quantity of technical information to choose from. The purpose is to emphasize what is important, and de-emphasize the unimportant. When I look at that slide, I see 95% utterly irrelevant information, and a teeny tiny note saying, in vague and indirect language, that the impact was 600x worse than any test.

So on the remote chance you're not just trolling: If you're doing anything safety critical, please quit your job before you kill someone. You vastly overestimate human's (including yours) ability to process information. I am being 100% sincere.

The NASA personnel gambled and it costed 7 lives. Somehow, a powerpoint slide was what caused it? Lol.

One of the dynamics is that if there is too much text they’ll read instead of listening to you. Another is that if the conclusion is on the deck, they’ll get bored waiting for you to get to the punchline they’ve already read, and that can lose your audience as well.

So you’re better off either opening with the conclusion or putting it on the next slide, but accidentally jumping two slides forward can still ruin your audience’s attention span. So sometimes it’s better for it not to be in the deck at all.

"Kings, heroes, and gods use a short and direct form of speech." -- theater maxim

it's also important to know your audience. If they've spent their career reading technical papers or dense prose, that's one thing.

If they've largely grown up in the social media era and click away from reels/shorts that don't have animated captions, you'd design a very different deck.

One could argue otherwise such as the Boeing 787 MAX MCAS Software Design.

> One day, I will teach them real engineering: It is Rails backend with React frontend. Zero kills. Life above all.

Buddy, if you think that is "real engineering", you've got a lot of things to learn.

Even in software engineering, rails and react aren't really engineering. Real engineering includes calculations -- data structures, algorithms, data structures, and user interfaces designed to work with people who are deaf or blind. You wanna tell me that rails is performant? Have you done calculations? You wanna tell me react's algorithms are well-defined in memory and time? Have you ensured that your "software" is usable by people with disabilities?