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Posted by sam_bristow 19 hours ago

Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf](web.mit.edu)
689 points | 229 commentspage 2
didgetmaster 16 hours 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 14 hours ago|
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, is how I always heard it phrased.
pugworthy 2 hours 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.

cameronh90 6 hours ago||
As Futurama said, when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
teddyh 3 hours 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>
whatever1 16 hours ago||
I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.
blitzar 10 hours ago||
> I never gave credit to my electricity company

That's what the moneys for ...

tikhonj 15 hours 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 14 hours 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

HerbManic 16 hours ago|||
Just remember, the power grid fails in theory but works in practice.
jesterson 14 hours 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.
m463 15 hours 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.

thx67 3 hours 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.

jacques_chester 18 hours 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 17 hours 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_chester 16 hours 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.
thx67 3 hours ago||
When you are at capacity and in a degraded state, you have no additional headroom to get out of that state. Why wounds won't heal, or the poor stay poor.
left-struck 12 hours 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.
smath 17 hours 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?
doctorwho42 16 hours 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.

fsagx 16 hours 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 7 hours ago||
After decades of infamous quality drops that have impacted their reputation and finally bottom line under non technical CEOs.
Root_Access 1 hour 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.
Jtsummers 18 hours 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

mdmabatj 17 hours 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'.
throw0101c 16 hours ago|
Aka:

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

teiferer 13 hours 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!
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