Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I love everything about submarines, aside from actually living in one, as I haven't experienced that.

What I HAVE experienced is working under an engineering manager/CTO/CIO that WAS a submariner and experienced first hand how a submariner manages a clouod-scale engineering team...

+ & -

-=-=-=-=-

He was reall sound, technically, and a good person. But an overbearing asshole when he was convinced he was correct, even when he wasn't.

Which was OK, because he would admit when he was wrong, but when he was in the moment of being wrong, was an asshole.

The funny thing was, this was my manager at two different companies, spaced abut ~10 years apart between when we had worked together.

He is a great guy and a great manager - (he's an EVP at Cisco now (again)) -- but you can REALLY see the submariner attitude come across in tense stand-ups in the morning if we have an issue...

Imagine a submariner engineering manager yell at a (not me) - blue/green-dyed-mohawk, gay steampunk engineer who wears vibram five fingers and a top hat and vest and sits on an inflatable ball during standup in sanfrancisco's mission district about scaling AWS spot instances...

Yeah... that was a time.

I love submarines, but submariners are weird.

About twenty years ago I had a boss that was a submariner, one of the guys that operated the reactor (I think they call themselves "nukes"?). He was quite odd but wickedly smart and it always seemed like he could engineer his way out of any situation, which I greatly admired. But yes, this guy was very down to earth, some odd combination of prepper and nature-loving hippie. Great guy to work for, I knew he always had my back.

A few years ago I worked with another reactor operator and saw some similar personality traits. Exceedingly calm, independent and quirky with an engineering/problem solving-oriented mind.

I've always been fascinated by submarines and knowing both of those people only deepened the fascination.

Would be interesting to see if they fall into the same Myer-Briggs personality type bucket

Would be more interesting to see colleges teach how submariners teach instead of teaching things like Myer-Briggs.

I've worked with submariners who were colleagues when I was in engineering and I found them great colleagues. They documented their work carefully, were precise in their language (although colorful), and didn't accept anything less than excellence on their team. Never had one as a boss, but I feel like I'd get along fine.

That said, I would never make it on a submarine myself.

Indeed - I have a very good friend who was a reactor operator on a sub - and I still can’t visualize him doing that. He’s pretty much the opposite of descriptions like these which I guess proves the point that generalizations are just that - generalizations and not hard or fast rules.

And nope, I would never make it on a sub either. Two years of ROTC pretty much ruled out any military service for me - let alone on a sub. But I’m grateful for those who are willing and choose to serve in those roles.

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