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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

The most troubling thing about this to me is Stockton Rush’s cavalier attitude toward ageism [1]. In considering young college graduates as uniquely “inspirational” he set them up for a lifetime of guilt. I don’t think age or race has any place in inspirational calculus. I’m uncomfortable with how comfortably he dismisses submariner veterans as “old white guys”.

Engineering is a discipline that requires experience and guidance. The young learn from the old. In this case accomplished engineers missed a chance to do rewarding work with young engineers and young engineers have to live with the guilt of killing their crew.

This is a lesson the entire tech industry would do well to meditate on. Especially when we call ourselves engineers.

[1]: https://youtu.be/4dka29FSZac&t=5m2s

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He might as well have said I couldn't inspire a 60 year old veteran in the field to work for me like a slave for pittance of a salary.

In engineering experience and precision and discipline matters a lot.

OTOH I hope he still is alive somewhere somehow down there and gets rescued, but he does speak like a douchustler.

The submarine imploded, so that is VERY unlikely.

Oh I was not aware of that part of the news. Sorry to hear this.

I thought they were still searching.

I don't think he even offered the 60 year old veterans a chance. Probably a few of them would have advised a bit for free.

And yet despite the naivety of their youth, his engineers still spoke out against his contraption and were fired. I don’t think an old man in the room would have helped.

I'm only aware of one engineer being fired for bringing up quality concerns. That is 49 year old David Lockridge. There are reports of a second former employee who had concerns but no details of their departure. I admit I do not have all the details so maybe there are more.

But that's not really the point. The point is ageism weakens engineering organizations. That's not a condemnation of youth. Just an observation that the veterans still have something to contribute.

> I don’t think an old man in the room would have helped.

I guess in this case it actively hurt.

>This is a lesson the entire tech industry would do well to meditate on.

This is a lesson everyone in the business of making things would do well to meditate on.

Age and skin color, let alone sex, don't a good product make. It's whether the people involved have what it takes to make a good product.

OceanGate clearly did not have what it takes, even if they did check all the proper identity boxes.

Yes, this applies to everyone. But I work in the tech industry so I’m speaking to that specifically. I’m in my late 30s and already feel the effects of ageism. Based on personal anecdotes that’s less of an issue in construction or farming for example.

> OceanGate clearly did not have what it takes, even if they did check all the proper identity boxes.

I don't think the ageism was some kind of identity politics - I assume it's b/c veterans refused to sign up to such an unsafe project, and the guy sugar-coated the dubious hiring practise by implying it was his choice not to hire them.

Why the gymnastics to avoid the obvious interpretation of his statement? Ageism is a widely known failing in the tech industry and hardly has any "rare disease" bayesian bias going against it...

I don't understand what you are saying; first of all, this isn't the tech industry..

The dynamics in engineering companies have a lot in common with the dynamics in software companies.

In this context, hiring sub veterans, often ex military, didn't seem similar.

Also, I don't think software companies do operate like engineering corps, especially safety critical ones. safety critical software companies themselves are a different breed.

> Age and skin color, let alone sex, don't a good product make.

Is this “don’t a good product make” considered (maybe not official grammar but) “right” English grammar? I’m not a native.

It is apparently called anastrophe, but yes it is correct but not common. I figured it's a hold over from Germanic sentence structures. As far as I can think of really it's only ever used in this type of sentence "something... Does not a adjective make"

Gpt4 seems to think it has no relation to Germanic roots of the language but my gut tells me there's probably no way this ordering finds it's way to English without that history

https://chat.openai.com/share/0c9a56d5-75e3-493f-96b2-2ac3a8...

As someone said: "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old-bold pilots!"

In a discussion with a work colleague, we agreed on the hope that out of this incident comes an increase in respect for "proper" engineering, maintenance, safety considerations; don't just remove Chesterton's fence because it's your way - it's in your way to slow you down and force you to look at something other than the obvious.

It’s almost like an abstract self-correction algorithm: Safety practices in the industry will always be just a bit above the emotional tolerance of average person to average incident.

What? Meditate on? What are you smoking?

Anyone remembers the Boeing MAX 8 issues? Safety procedures / processes had been disabled on purpose for greed and people eventually died as a result. History has a truckload of examples in that direction, also because, despite better knowledge, proactively trying to prevent problems is often seen as some expense that is not needed ... until something happens and then the blame shifting starts.

At least in this case the perpetrator was eating his own dog food and choked on it. Good riddance. Unfortunately, and yet again, others had to suffer (and some do for having lost family / friends) for this incompetence as well. But there will be no learning process, the amount of people like him is just too vast and they are too dense in their heads to face reality for what it is because they are just too used to "bending reality" to their will. That works with people (up to a certain degree), but when it comes to physics, there is a hard wall they will crack their skulls open.

What are you talking about?

Virtually the entire world has taken a peek behind the curtain of these extreme sub adventures. Anyone that matters now understands they are extremely risky , and its very likely no 1 company will be able to nurture this market for years without serious engineering bonafides.

And as an additional bonus, the main culprit has been taken out of the gene pool. This is actually rare.

We can argue about the price, but this is pure learning, at every level.

>> Virtually the entire world has taken a peek behind the curtain of these extreme sub adventures. Anyone that matters now understands they are extremely risky...

Right. People will be afraid of subs for years. I'm glad we learned so much from this.

as well they should be. the ocean is a deadly place, and tiny screw ups can and will kill people, doubly so in submersibles.

thing is, we know how to do it safely, too; "regulations are written in blood" etc etc.

Apparently being ageist is now "woke". What an incredibly flexible term the right wing has appropriated!

Conservatives Are Now Blaming The Titanic Sub Tragedy On 'Wokeness':

https://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-now-blaming-titanic-sub...

This is a harmful comment. Ageism is a real issue in tech and we should be able to talk about it constructively. It's unfortunate you responded to such an opportunity with a shallow invocation of a political wedge issue.

As Jon Stewart once said "Please stop hurting us."

Most old engineers I’ve worked with are terrible and many younger ones are way more talented.

Your troll craft is somewhat lacking

This is the attitude you need to give birth to truly innovative ideas like a Bluetooth controller attached to the desktop PC that controlled his hunk of shit submarine that killed everyone on board.

He proudly describes it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc

Does he ever explain why carbon fiber and bluetooth were improvements over working technology?

I remember seeing a claim that the Bluetooth part was a feature since you could just "pass the controller" inside the cabin but I haven't been able to find a source for it.

As for the carbon fibre:

>OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush says the company had been evaluating the potential of using a carbon fiber composite hull since 2010, primarily because it permits creation of a pressure vessel that is naturally buoyant and, therefore, would enable OceanGate to forgo the use — and the significant expense — of syntactic foam on its exterior. So, for Cyclops 2 OceanGate decided to avoid the metallic hull altogether and began a search for a manufacturer that could help it develop a composite hull.

https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/composite-submersib...

Thanks for the citation.

Handing the controller around smells like marketing wank, especially when you learn they bolted down the shitter and made the controls remote. Seems like an odd tradeoff. I’d be inclined to use a portable toilet or diapers and firmly attach the controls to the sub near the only window. People can still take turns.

It kind of makes sense considering the only viewport is on the opposite side of the submarine away from the PCs which interface with the controls.

Maybe the intent was for someone to peak out the window to perform a maneuver.

Still, I hope there was a wired controller as a backup just in case.

> I remember seeing a claim that the Bluetooth part was a feature since you could just "pass the controller" inside the cabin but I haven't been able to find a source for it.

Here: https://youtu.be/ClkytJa0ghc?t=40

I read somewhere that by reducing the weight of the hull, it eliminated the need for the expensive tooling traditionally needed on the mothership to hoist the vessel in and out of the water. This was key to the business model of his shoestring budget amusement park ride to the bottom of the sea.

> amusement park ride

I would wager that safety is better - not least because standards are tougher - on almost every amusement ride around.

"Carnival park ride" would have been more apt. Those things aren't nearly as safe as the rides at real amusement parks.

To lower costs in order to attract more billionaire customers.

Is it possible that you can keep the carbon fiber hull as a solid piece with no penetrations, making it more watertight?

I kind of envision this craft as being a sealed capsule full of humans with all the propulsion equipment and batteries strapped to the outside and controlled wirelessly from the inside. But I haven't seen a full diagram of how Oceangate worked. Like, how did CO2 get scrubbed from the cabin?

The carbon fiber obviated the need for expensive to produce syntactic foams.

The Bluetooth?

Eh. It was there.

The sad thing is, the carbon fiber hull material may not necessarily be a totally losing proposition if you can make the carbon fiber hull module swappable and recyclable, and testable.

Evidently they got, what? 20ish descents to service depth before it lost integrity?

If you worked from there, and figured out those pesky details, you could make something workable.

In fact, we may even be lauding the man if they'd done the 30 + journeys to service depth unmanned, and used the data collected from scanning/ultrasounding or otherwise probing that hull piece to draw strong, clear, unambiguous bars around "number of trips til new hull needs to be swapped in".

Nobody would fault the guy for doing that, and he may have truly advanced the State of the Art in ways he'd still be alive to enjoy.

But here we are.

I do agree with you, though I think BT game controller wasn't a bad idea for two reasons:

- Battle-tested and easily replaceable, compared to a custom one.

- Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.

The carbonfiber structure... that's another story. Terrible.

The Logitech F710 was not a "battle-tested" controller, it's a cheap third party controller of inferior quality. The official Microsoft controllers have serious R&D behind them, but not the Logitech ones.

third party doesn't mean anything if you're not controlling a first party device

He's right on the cheap part though, I had that controller and it will sometimes looks connection, making you spin around as if you kept the joystick in position. I threw that thing away..

Logitech is a reputable brand making reliable components, not like those Chinese weird brands.

It is battle tested by being used by so many people around the world.

I don't understand what you imply by "3rd party". 3rd party in relation to what exactly in this context?

In gaming, 3rd party accessories are ones nit made by the manufacturer of the game system. The first party is the console manufacturer (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) and the second party is the end user.

Logitech makes some great mice but their game controllers are notoriously poor quality for the price, especially since the first party controllers aren't much more expensive.

Some of the "weird brand" gamepads like 8bitdo are considered better than Logitech or even Nintendo!

It's simply not fit for the purpose. The ocean floor is an incredibly inhospitable place. This is safety critical. It's like performing surgery in a hospital setting with a pocket knife to cut costs. Though if fate hadn't already killed them by now, I'm sure the cavalier "who wants to drive?" passing the controller around the cabin would have gotten them snagged on the wreckage in due time. (Remember the Russian jet that crashed when the captain turned the controls over to his kids?) I am consumed by this story and how every new detail revealed seems more and more insane.

It's not battle tested.

The navy uses the standard actually battle tested xbox controller and the logitech one has many 1 star reviews on amazon, enough said.

You can literally search on google and see this in 5 seconds, it's bizarre that it keeps being spouted in some posts, almost makes me a bit suspicious because it's so dumb.

Bluetooth as the only means of control of a sub that would most definitely kill you if it loses control? The same battle tested Bluetooth that still can't reliably connect to the exact same device despite having done so all the time? The same Bluetooth that disconnects if I were to turn on 2 more Bluetooth devices due to interference?

How about the batteries that are required to power a wireless controller? Everything on a patchwork sub needs to be at least n+2 across failure domains. I wouldn't have gone in that sub even with n+5 and a paycheck TBH.

How much money was he trying to save here? Competitive gamers with a way lower net worth stick to tethered controllers for a reason, low latency and reliable connection.

Furthermore, I can believe a bunch of b/millionaires being duped into paying a non-refundable $250k. But I am struggling with the fact that they saw the abyssal porta potty and the BT controller, and still thought it was wise to enter.

The best case scenario here was an 8 hour trip in a space that's worse than long haul Economy to see Titanic ruins on a TV screen. I really don't get the value proposition here.

That poor kid.

The other major issue with the controller is that it is not designed for a marine environment -- the water, salt exposure, and humidity inside the sub. Surely there are off-the-shelf marine controllers that are better suited.

  - Cables have a snapping risk in that limited physical space, Bluetooth solves it and there's no risk of EMI 4km underwater anyway.

Cables can easily be made practically 'unsnappable' in this context

Controls could also be mounted directly to a fixed panel, as is the case in most (all?) other submarines

My engineer brain says that moving from 'wired' to 'bluetooth' for a safety-critical connection is pure lunacy. I don't think any objective appraisal could reasonably conclude that this decreased risk or increased safety. Bluetooth is not even close to reliable enough for this application, and neither is any other wireless technology as far as I know

The situation is quite often the exact opposite: young engineers often fail to see the big picture and don’t know how to find the adequate architecture or approach to solve a problem in a genuine way, while experienced engineers will have a natural, intuitive approach that works easily.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve looked at a project by some engineer in their 20s, and it is so over-engineered and complicated, entirely lacking in any ability to future proof against onboarding or feature development, so clever they probably are very proud of themselves, but mostly useless.

Less experienced people probably start with a design that looks like it might do what they need.Then they keep tacking on things as they hit limitations. This might be the right approach but an experienced person would know when to cut their losses and start over. A desperate newcomer would double down on adding shit leading to a convoluted complex mess.

And what do you think happens to those talented young engineers when they get older? Are they no longer talented, just old?

Sounds like you need to find a better job. Good luck, with that attitude.

Are you seriously trying to suggest that less experienced engineers are better than more experienced engineers?

Hubris like this will leave you joining the other ghosts floating around the wreck of the titanic shortly.

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