Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

After having spent 10 years in the US nuclear navy, i am surprised at how many things are obvious in that organization that no one else seemingly has any idea about:

"When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle." -Admiral Rickover, creator of the US Nuclear Navy

the hang-up button in between the audio- and video- mute buttons results from the lack of responsibility described above. any single person would agree this is wrong, therefor no single person is in charge.

I've always liked Apple's DRI[1] concept. You have a single responsible person who is the final decision maker about the [product | feature | initiative]. No more dodging tough calls and diffusing the responsibility over a project across 5 different PMs, 3 designers, 4 tech leads, and 2 executive sponsors, so that really nobody is responsible for anything. The buck stops at a single, known decision maker. Most company cultures can't quite manage to do this, as everyone seems to have to have this weird fractional "ownership" of some part of the product.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/how-well-does-...

In addition to what you said, you need these DRIs to actually care. And they need a good mechanism for feedback since they’re not going to know what’s broken if everyone is afraid of harshly criticizing or even cancelling the entire product.

You need Steve Jobs at the top. What happens with DRIs today at Apple is complacency sets in since no one is complaining, feedback (demo days with Steve) is getting weaker and less threatening. And, shitty ideas get democratized and perpetuated since no one is there to put an end to it.

Is the Navy really a good example of command structures that promote effective UI?

According to Propublica, part of the reason for the Fitzgerald crash was bad interface design. https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

> Is the Navy really a good example

good question. In the US, the nuclear navy is basically a separate organization. they are still in the military chain of command, but the nuclear portions are all separately: managed, manufactured, repaired, operated, trained, audited etc.

It probably depends on how "sexy" the UI in question is meant to be. I've read that on submarines, every pipe that leads to the outside ocean has a primary control valve in one place, each with a physical handle that is turned sideways when the valve is closed. Thus, it is immediately apparent by looking at the valve array whether any valve that potentially opens to the ocean is properly shut before deep-depth dives.

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