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Comment by happyopossum | Hacker News Reader

The idea that every accident can be prevented by delight is a ridiculous and utopian trope, and to demonize an entire corporate culture and group of 12k employees without any background information is the height of hubris.

Nobody would ever design a ladder that cannot be climbed without a safety harness being properly worn, but many people are injured or killed in ladder accidents at workplaces every year. In your world that's a design failure, but out here in reality it's often carelessness or sheer bad luck.

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>but out here in reality

This, I expect, is exactly the kind of bad cultural attitude that @mabbo was referring to. You're advocating for accidents as being an unavoidable cost of business while preemptively hand-waving them as being the fault of careless employees or fate.

As @P5fRxh5kUvp2th points out, there are established industry safety measures to avoid exactly these kinds of accidents when working around dangerous machinery, in the lockout/tagout system.

If tests are locked out while employees are tagged into an area, you can't accidentally smack them into a coma with an over-pressurized part blowing out. By requiring tag ins to access dangerous areas, you don't have to have employees remember someone is out there, or that a test is coming, or worry about anyone getting confused on either front.

Blaming the employee for being where they shouldn't be or the other for running tests when someone was nearby is a cop out. It shouldn't even be possible for it to happen at all.

Design your systems and processes to expect that humans are fallible.

Impossible. Humans will find a way to bypass anything.

As a kid, I remember a lot of people complained about how annoying car seatbelts are, and tried to avoid them, but I haven't heard that sentiment at all in the past 20 years - everyone I know is perfectly happy with them as a safety measure. It seems to me it just required some time for the culture to shift.

> You're advocating for accidents as being an unavoidable cost of business while preemptively hand-waving them as being the fault of careless employees or fate.

This needs seconding. It's ridiculous to say that we can't demonize an entire company of 12,000 people, and in the same breath, turn around to demonize the line workers of that company.

It's no less ridiculous to instead demonize the line workers that got hurt, which seems to be both post-facto cherrypicking, and victim blaming.

Do not make The Perfect an enemy of The Good.

Merely because some accidents still happen despite motivated and brilliant people working to prevent them does not mean that the effort should not be made.

You don't abandon the endeavor, but nor do you just throw caution to the winds.

The article had a great example of a competing space company with an evidently solid safety culture; an accident was reported, and inspection done, and zero issues were found (which is quite difficult to be good enough have an OSHA inspection find nothing of note)

>> Relativity has a strong safety record relative to others in the industry, with just one OSHA safety inspection since it was founded in 2015. The inspection, spurred by an accident, did not result in a violation.

> Do not make The Perfect an enemy of The Good.

That's all well and good, but you also can't demonize an entire culture based on unrealistic navel-gazing. It's entirely possible this was a process or design problem that could have been prevented, but it's also possible that it's not - pretending you know based on few details in a one-sided article is pretty silly.

> pretending you know based on few details in a one-sided article is pretty silly

No. It is not. There is one telling detail in the article. SpaceX was fined by OSHA. That pretty much means in itself that there were things SpaceX shoulf have done which they didn’t.

We can’t and won’t do each our own investigation. Nobody believes that the article has enough details to decide the case on its merrits. But we know that someone professional did the investigation and found the company violated the safety norms. That is what we have these agencies for.

> SpaceX was fined $18,475 by OSHA for two safety violations, one of which was rated the highest penalty level of “serious” and a maximum gravity of 10.

Though the article says "highest penalty level," according to OSHA's website had the violation been "Willful or Repeated" it would have resulted in up to a $145k fine[1].

[1] https://www.osha.gov/penalties

> SpaceX was fined by OSHA

We don't know what for, or if the fined offense would have prevented this accident.

Considering Relativity hasn't actually launched a rocket yet (they are aiming for first launch this year), they are more a prospective competitor.

It’s worth noting that SpaceX has about 20 times the number of employees as Relativity and Relativity has not yet launched anything to orbit whereas Falcon has over 180 flights. I don’t think we can objectively say the culture at Relativity is objectively safer yet. Relativity is also an extremely new company in comparison to SpaceX.

To extend that line of argument a bit, what about a more professional tool/system, e.g. cherry pickers?

Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you to design and engineer cherry pickers such that the bucket can’t be moved unless a safety harness is attached?

> Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you to design and engineer cherry pickers such that the bucket can’t be moved unless a safety harness is attached?

No - that seems unreasonable too, as there's no reasonable way for the cherry picker to know if the harness is being worn by anyone, so it's just safety theater.

Combine it with immediately firing anyone caught attaching an empty harness to a cherry picker and the cherry picker can be reasonably sure that the harness is worn by someone.

You replace ladders with scaffolding and cherry pickers or similar things, though those too can have their safety issues ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YBxOA-aQQE )

I guarantee you that every job site manager in the WORLD can identify the unsafe employees, even if they're doing 'everything by the book'.

Some of it can be designed away (two-hand tools for example) but some of it is basically inherent.

Accepting at face value the claim that "every job site manager on earth" really can identify the "unsafe employees", then these managers are negligent and thus culpable for the failed outcomes.

An infinitely better course of action is to ban all known-unsafe employees from operating in the risky path. Workers who unnecessarily put themselves and everyone else in jeopardy have no business being in the path.

With that said, I'm highly skeptical about the veracity of this claim. Human behavior is fundamentally unstable, oscillating in the continuity spectrum between stable and erratic. However, the amount of variability for a given individual tends to be stable, which may be what you are saying a good and effective manager should be able to catch.

Regardless, humans are wetware and fundamentally error prone. Best to account for this element of our nature in the larger system design.

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