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Comment by nullserver | Hacker News Reader

My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such.

Anyway the process as such did not work as documented.

You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere.

Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete the work.

Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.

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It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up"

Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.

I would be very interested in reading case studies where a company both does documentation well and does not get bogged down in vast amounts of paperwork.

As yes, plenty of fixes for things are not written down anywhere.

If you haven't read it, you'd probably enjoy (and anyone interested in process) The Toyota Way by Liker.

Thanks!

Unfortunately, every company that I have been at that has tried to implant the Toyota Way just bolted additional processes onto their legacy ones, adding complexity.

Reproducibility.

Have others come in and follow the directions.

It makes sense that new employees are trained on the job from actual line workers, rather than by reading documentation.

It is totally possible that the line workers have no idea what the documentation on the tooling says.

Makes sense in the short term, but not the long term, as the entire article makes clear

From the conversation, admittedly 20 years ago. Not documenting was highly intentional, and why I was being informed.

I've seen that way too many times. "Why doesn't this link in the internal console work?" "Oh, after you click it and get the error, you have to remove the trailing dash character and refresh." "Weird, I wonder how this slipped by Jared in QA when he tested it. We better let him know." "Don't bother, Jared is the one who showed me how to remove the dash...."

It is genuinely impossible to document every lityle nuance that makes everything work.

Every time i am dealing in new hires, i realise how much we just take for granted

No, the problem is that while you are writing documentation you are not making money for the company. I remember when I and Dave as the senior tech told our boss that we should put the most common repairs into a database so new hires would not have to ask us questions all the time.

He asked how long the job would take, and we answered about a week for all the common stuff. And his answer was, "That is a week you will not be making the company any money.".

We tried to explain the long term savings, but he was not interested.

I think the best way to think of this part of a wiki is as a cache for everybody's help. No need to pre-populate the cache, just start using it, and the most frequently used information will tend to be there.

Definitely, not perfect readme or documentation but at least that covers 70% of cases.

It might have been protectionism, but also life is just complicated. Documentation is always incomplete and much of it is out of date as soon as you write it down. Humans have so many cognitive biases, we don't even notice half the things we do.

Many scientific studies cannot be replicated either due to errors or ambiguous steps.

You only have what you test. If you want working documentation, you have to do a blind test. That can be pretty dang expensive, and most people don't think that way. Running production is heavily motivated to just keep running, and not worry too much about all of the potential problems - there are just too many potential problems.

Conversely, a lot of management have zero interest in knowing this kind of detail. It may not be possible to get the info fed back. People may be punished for not following the process, even if it's impossible to get the job done by following it exactly ( this is a very common dysfunction!)

Yeah this sort of "why didn't the lowest-paid employee do more work without permission so her boss's boss's boss wouldn't have to think too hard" suggestion surprises me a lot more often than it should surprise me. Sure, it would benefit shareholders, but companies are run by executives.

> Always stuck with me that at some point the ability to make that part would be los-tech.

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech

As some siblings have commented, it's probably the failure to get back and document it. But the desire for job protection is not uncommon. I saw it when I worked on testing satellite power converters at a large aerospace company. There were procedures and paperwork for everything, but the test procedure for one series of power converters did not work. Only one technician knew how to actually test them. He led me through it, and he had plenty of time to update the procedures, but refused to do it. It was gross and obvious what he was doing, but somehow he was allowed to get away with it. There was no union.

So many problems could be solved by giving every adult $1,000,000 in a one-time, tax-free, no strings attached, lump sum.

The technician refused to document the procedure because he was afraid of becoming replaceable. He was afraid of becoming replaceable because he was afraid of losing his job. He was afraid of losing his job because he would lose his sole source of income.

Let's just give people free money already.

Sorry, very often it is ego. Even is the job is secure, the worker thinks he is special because s/he knows something the others do not.

I'm pretty sure this is sarcasm. But I never know these days because a lot of people actually avocate things like this. After seeing what happens to most people after they receive a lot of free stuff, especially large sums of money, I would never advocate something like this. There's also the rather obvious issue about how it would be paid for but, again, there a lots of people who think you can just print money out of thin air forever and nothing will ever happen.

The return of guilds.

Part of it may have been job protection.

Management gets exactly the behaviours from employees that it rewards and incentivises.

Apparently that is a Russian proverb: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

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