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

lstodd

> 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.

Jtsummers

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_chester

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.

rmunn

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.

random3

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

timmg

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

hedora

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.

senectus1

sounds like my day to day job experience.

mdmabatj

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

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.

erelong

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

Guestmodinfo

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

nxy

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

sublinear

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.

ChicknNuggt

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

dang

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

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

smath

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?

didgetmaster

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.

jmyeet

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/