Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

One of our clients at $Job is a testing laboratory for mold & asbestos samples - just from building inspectors & such. To maintain their modest accreditations, every single Analyst (person looking at submitted samples through a microscope) at that lab has to perform daily duplicates & replicates of their own & their coworkers' results (and achieve fairly demanding levels of consistency on those). Then they trade samples with other labs weekly or monthly, to demonstrate further consistency & accuracy of results. Then the accrediting inspectors come through to inspect regularly. Then...

Where the hell were the grown-ups, let alone an inspector who actually understood laboratory QC, when the FBI was running a Keystone Cops clown lab for years?

See, your job is to get accurate results because clients are paying to know if they have a problem or not. The FBI's job is to get convictions, so their lab's job is to create railroadable pseudo-evidence.

Mold lawsuits are very common; the money in mold testing is to always find mold. People who honestly want to know whether they have a problem are dwarfed in number by people who honestly want a certificate that says mold was found.

Maybe as a generality. But for our laboratory client at $Job, it very definitely is not. There are plenty of people (home owners, landlords, contractors, pharmacies, etc.) who would prefer that mold not be present. And have a large financial interest in getting accurate results.

Working at an industrial hygiene company that works with large train companies in particular, doing studies on everything from asbestos to air particulates.

The entire industry is around finding where those issues exist, using accurate data to track it, and solve whatever problems come up to avoid the large risk of getting sued by employees or communities nearby.

I did QA on all the data that came in from labs and matched it all the various input samples we sent off. Incredibly thorough testing procedures, redundancy, and tracking over time was the name of the game for my companies entire business. They've been successful for 30+ years doing that too.

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