I cannot fly professionally anymore due to health, but this is something we are taught in aviation and something I too find lacking from tech so far.
Like, you’re taught the standards as part of learning to fly, but as time goes on, you’re told to narrow your tolerance of what is acceptable. So if you are learning how to do steep turns, for instance, the altitude standard is +- 100’. You’re taught, “that’s the minimum, you should be trying for 50’” and then 20’, then the absolute best performance would be where you do your turn, the needle doesn’t move, and as you roll out on a calm day you fly through your wake. But the goal is “better, always better, what can I do better?” And flying is not graded on the overall performance, if you don’t do satisfactory everywhere you fail. Culturally satisfactory, isn’t, it’s the starting point.
That encourages a much more collaborative model I feel like. I’ve only worked one or two flying jobs that were not collaborative. In the outside world it sometimes feels the opposite. In flying, you truly want everyone to succeed and do well, and the company does. Even the guys I hated that I flew with, I didn’t want them to fail. If they failed, I was partially responsible for that.
It wasn’t always perfect, and I worked with some legendary assholes while I was flying, but truly, they supported me and I supported them, and if I screwed up (or they screwed up) the culture required that we found a way to minimize the future potential screwups.
You’re actually trained on what quality means in a wide variety of contexts too, and flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) is a big part of many airlines. In smaller bush operations where I worked, it is significantly more informal, but we truly had a “no fault” culture in nearly all the places I worked. It’s not perfect, but that’s the point, “ok how can we make this better?”
If someone had an idea for how to do something better, there may have been friction, but that was rare if it actually was better, and as soon as you could show how adoption was fast even at the less standardized operations I worked at.
Not saying it’s all unicorns and rainbows, but I feel like quality, and decision making, and “doing the right thing” were an integral part of the culture of aviation. “The weather is too bad and I cannot do this safely” grounds the flight, you don’t blast off into the shit (at reputable operators) to get the job done anymore (it’s not 1995), and it feels like this new industry is the opposite.
The entire concept of a “minimum viable product” is somewhat illustrative of the problem. It shouldn’t be the “minimum viable” it should be the “minimum quality product we’re willing to accept as a starting point.” But that doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way.
We shouldn’t be striving for anything that’s the “minimum.” The minimum is only the beginning.