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Comment by formerkrogemp | Hacker News Reader

> The accountants took over the company, and the good engineers left.

As an accountant, I would quibble with this aspersion and lay the blame with management and other, broader issues.

> It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job elsewhere.

This seems true of many companies. Many of us are just playing musical chairs with our careers and jobs trying to find that job that doesn't suck.

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I am sorry for insulting accountants and I realise what wrote is too harsh (but hey this is the internet so ...).

And you cannot have engineers running everything because then you will have a half-built Concorde and a bankrupt company.

But there is a balance. And if that balance tips for too long, you end up with the whole organisation content with just doing maintenance. And when that happens there is just no going back.

> I am sorry for insulting accountants and I realise what wrote is too harsh (but hey this is the internet so ...).

No worries. I didn't mean to sound angry. I appreciate the apology, didn't think it was necessary, and understand where you're coming from. I think you have valid points. I am very bad at reading and writing tone in quick comments online. I agree that having accountants and mba types in charge isn't a great idea most of the time or that accountants are necessarily the best people on average, but I am wee bit biased here against such blanket statements regarding my profession, as an accountant anyways.

You are describing a sort of cultural inflection point. It would be interesting to read more about that.

In the aviation industry, Lockheed Martin famously avoided 'resting on its laurels' by having a separate 'skunkworks' part (who made the U-2, SR-71 and practically invented 'stealth' i.e. F-117, F-22, etc)

It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called 'stealth'. If you look on Google you can find the PDF.

Another book about organisations having to deal with ossification is 'the soul of a new machine'. It's written by a journalist that was embedded in a R&D department of a computer manufacturer in the 70's and 80's. The place is run by someone a lot like Kelly Johnson, and the author managed very well to get into his mind. Again, I believe you can find a PDF on Google.

Finished "The Soul of a New Machine". It's fantastic. It mostly takes place in 1978-1979, although the machine debuted in the first half of 1980.

The Skunkworks book was OK. Lots of memorable anecdotes, but not nearly as well-written as Kidder's book.

"It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called 'stealth'."

The time period doesn't quite match up, but I found Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316743003/ to be quite interested if not quite as interesting as I'd hoped when I bought it.

Well, of course the blame is with management. Accountants shouldn't take over a company, and if they are leading the decisions, it's the management's fault.

It's quite like engineers taking over the marketing department.

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