Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

> What did this man think was going to happen?

I think you're giving him too much credit. People try things. They repeat the things that work. Most thinking happens when the behavior stops working.

That's why long/broken feedback loops in systems are so dangerous. E.g., a big reason the Challenger disaster happened is NASA ignoring warning signs because they had gotten away with it before. If a zillion NASA engineers didn't really think it through when lives were on the line, it's no surprise some 22-year-old rando just kept doing the thing that worked.

Another good point for comparison is Theranos. How many people with advanced degrees worked there without ever catching on to how screwed they were? Without ever really verifying that it was a successful business that actually produced value for its customers? And that's just the obvious fraud. I've seen many insider stories here about startups that were only slightly less dubious.

View on HN

> Theranos. How many people with advanced degrees worked there without ever catching on to how screwed they were?

Tons of people inside Thernos asked questions and then eventually left when they realized there was no answer. Especially the smart guys at the top who knew the most.

The book said the securty guy described an almost constant flow of people turning in their badges/fobs from getting fired by the Balwani guy. The team was constantly losing talent and replacing them... but they always had enough money, reputable backers, and positive PR to fool the rest and attract more.

Any lively business community with plenty of easy money floating around will attract a scammy subset. That's a human problem, not one unique to startups. Finance has plenty too, as does fracking, just like biotech did with Theranos. And it's a problem largely accounted for by established VCs as it's always a risk.

Sure, but there were also plenty of people who didn't leave.

And honestly, I think VCs are another good example of the problem here. They are notorious for being herd animals. They celebrate "pattern matching", by which they mean repeating the behaviors that previously led them to make money. If investors were all that good at thinking things through, they wouldn't have burned $1.4 billion dollars on Theranos.

> If investors were all that good at thinking things through, they wouldn't have burned $1.4 billion dollars on Theranos.

Some of the investors were old and they were just happy to have a relatively attractive woman founder.

Cant edit my comment but the journalist John Carreyrou who broke the story said that.

There was always a chance that they make it. Every startup is just a nice wish, maybe a few good ideas, plus hopefully lucky and competent folks mixed with some money.

The idea is great, everyone wants a lab on a chip. MEMS is coming, etc. Someone will eventually make it.

There was never a chance that Theranos would make it, because, per POSIWID, the purpose of Theranos was not to make it. Anybody who talked like you did was fooling themselves because they liked the paychecks. Just like the Amazon thief.

What? Just throwing in some "systems thinking buzzword" is not a real argument.

I'm not aware we have definitive evidence that Theranos was intended to be a scam all along. So if it wasn't then it was intended to make it, no? Naturally, you can say that there was a tipping point, when they started to do the scam more than anything else. But that's not exactly the fault of the investment model, nor the fact that there's a big push to get microscale labs, because currently there's no consensus about it's impossibility (quite the contrary, though it's obviously quite a big challenge), so it makes sens to invest into a company that tries to do it.

Now, being inside and compromising one's integrity for paychecks is a different matter. On the one hand there are people in hard situations that change their thinking - but it's unlikely that qualified people were stuck there against their better wishes. On the other hand trying to get investors to choose you when every other company is also doing their very best to convince the investors leads to the usual fucked up borderline-lies / overpromises / demos (see also ghettotesting, see also MagicLeap.

I'm not trying to advocate somehow "overlooking" Theranos' misdeeds. I'm simply stating the obvious, that there was a chance. (After all, they got the money, the people, the vision. I also don't condone how they got the money, even if, as I mentioned, it's hard to get money while honesty is not exactly rewarded.)

What was that saying again about how hard it is to get someone to realise something when their paycheck depends on them not realising it?

> a zillion NASA engineers didn't really think it through when lives were on the line

The in-depth investigation following the Challenger disaster [0] actually reached a slightly different conclusion: engineers tended to estimate ~1/100 launches would end in failure, while management estimates were about 3-6 orders of magnitude lower. The engineers did think it through; it was management that failed utterly and completely in their assigned task.

Anyway, I think your point is correct, but in this case it was management who learned that they could keep ignoring engineering expertise and get away with it until it literally blew up in their faces. Anyone who's had their boss urge them to rush bad code out the door (only to get chewed out when it fails as catastrophically as they knew it would) is familiar with this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report

Thanks for the correction.

But I'm not sure I agree with your diagnosis. I suppose it depends on how one thinks of engineers and software developers. Are we professionals, like doctors, with a bedrock responsibility to society and our users? Or are we just very well-paid gofers, who do whatever the bosses say?

In my view, responsibility isn't a zero-sum game. Sure, the managers failed. But the engineers also failed, and in the same way the Amazon thief did: they had reason to suspect consequences were coming, but they hung around because it was rewarding.

> Several of the [...] engineers stated their concerns about the O-rings and urged a delay, but the concerns didn't get communicated beyond the Level III Flight Readiness Review (FRR).

I think this is partially a fault of engineers, and/or the development/project model. They were not able to clearly state that no, it's a no-go, or yes, it's a go, they had "concerns". But that is probably useless. Therefore the problem is they lacked the conceptualization framework, a risk model, to state the severity of their concern, what is it based on, and someone should have been able to aggregate it and determine how this estimated risk influences the mission's overall risk.

That said, it is entirely the management's fault that they lacked this critical expertise/competence to manage risk and the project, and the engineers. (And naturally some of those managers themselves were engineers.)

I don't see any evidence in the Rogers report summary that management believed the launch failure rate would be 1 in 10^8. It seems like the report suggests a management belief of 1 in 10^5 (which is still fantastically and unjustifiably optimistic given the complexity and historical track record of space missions, of course).

The typical reliable car fails to about as frequently as 1 in 10,000.

Was Theranos a bad deal, or did the people who worked there get paid handsomely for their part in the fraud?

This. I wonder why those who worked there and were party to to it were not prosecuted in some way for their part in the deceit. They allowed it to continue by not whistleblowing the issues. They should be charged somehow.

I think a lot of the execs probably should be charged. And ditto for many of the lower-down workers as well if they participated in doing anything fraudulent.

However, I don't entirely want to blame the workers. US business culture very strongly leans towards a sort of neo-feudalism, where the CEO is always right, where one's allegiance is to the company, and where there are many techniques for silencing people. E.g., when I got laid off from Twitter they gave me zero notice, and made any severance conditional on signing a nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreement that went much further than the one I signed when I joined.

I had good savings and no family, so I turned them down. But a lot of people can't do that. Personally, I think we should make that illegal, and have every NDA specifically exempt reporting malfeasance.

They burned $1.4 billion dollars and produced nothing useful. It was bad.

"Bad" accurately describes Theranos's effect on society, but the comment you are replying to is probably asking about the effect of deciding to take a job at Theranos on the personal well-being of the individual making the decision.

After all, nobody is claiming that the Amazon dirt scam had a positive effect on society. The question in this thread was whether the dirt scammer's decisions were individually personally rational.

Your bringing up Theranos does not seem to me (and probably does not seem to grandparent) to shed any light on this question because it might have been individually personally rational for someone to take a job at Theranos: none of Theranos's non-management employees were required to give back their salary after Theranos was discovered to have been a fraud.

In both cases it was rational in the short term: the money kept coming in.

And "individually personally rational" is a weird way to say "greedy sociopath who only cares about how much money was pocketed".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com