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

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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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

The tragedy is that “nothing broke” looks like “nothing was done” to people far enough away from the system.

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.

> 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.

> It's a serious problem in this industry

s/in this industry//

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.

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.

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.

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

could an AI product solve this?

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.

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

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.

Car industry best practices

>>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!

Track leading indicators, pricing them if possible.

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.

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.

"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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

  > elegant solutions

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.

"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity"

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> I never gave credit to my electricity company

That's what the moneys for ...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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]

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.