On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991) | Hacker News Reader

On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991)

larch-www.lcs.mit.edu

115 pointsrramadass25 comments

Are not wrong about MA rotaries. The Concord rotary on Rt 2 was exciting before they rebuilt it. The junction of 2a into the rotary still is exciting.

Ha, I’ve hit a that rotary exactly once about 20 years ago and I remember it was a bit of a sight.

They have done some new road-marking over the last couple of years but I remember that when I briefly commuted into Boston (and sometimes drove) it was pretty much chaos when school started up and a lot of people weren't familiar with the traffic flow.

There was a partial rebuild of Rt. 2 where 2A cuts off to Minuteman Historical Park. (Concord Corner I think it's called.) My understanding is that there's a major rebuild of the actual rotary in the area where the correctional facility is in West Concord coming. The twin doughnuts of death going into Cambridge are still alive and well.

When I had to drive into Boston as opposed to taking the train as a commute, 6:15am was about the latest I could leave for it not to be completely insane.

One quote that I find funny from today’s point of view:

As we approach the present, corresponding to a personal computer, the graph really should become more complicated since one consequence of computers becoming super-cheap is that increasingly, they are being embedded in other equipment. The modern automobile is but one example. And it remains to be seen how general-purpose the current wave of palm-sized computers will be with their stylus inputs.

Pdf of the lecture here : https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/114669.114686

Note the six points mentioned in the final "Conclusions" section;

First it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties and as we have seen, creating mistakes. My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

Second, the value of metaphors should not be underestimated. Metaphors have the virtue that they have an expected behavior that is understood by all. Unnecessary communication and misunderstandings are reduced. Learning and education are quicker. In effect metaphors are a way of internalizing and abstracting concepts such that one's thinking can be on a higher plane and low-level mistakes are avoided.

Third, use of constrained languages for design or synthesis is a powerful methodology. By not allowing a programmer or designer to express irrelevant ideas, the domain of possible errors becomes far more limited.

Fourth, one must try to anticipate both errors of human usage and of hardware failure and properly develop the necessary contingency paths. This process of playing "what if" is not as easy as it may sound since implicit is the need to attach likelihoods of occurrence to events and to address issues of the independence of failures.

Fifth, it should be assumed in the design of a system, that it will have to be repaired or modified. The overall effect will be a much more robust system, where there is a high degree of functional modularity and structure, and repairs can be made easily.

Sixth, and lastly, on a large project, one of the best investments that can be made is the cross-education of the team so that nearly everyone knows more than he or she needs to know. Clearly with educational redundancy, the team is more resilient to unexpected tragedies or departures. But in addition, the increased awareness of team members can help catch global or systemic mistakes early. It really is a case of "more heads are better than one."

A lot of these are good, but not sure how easy it is to do anymore with Jack Welch style management everywhere (thinking about #6 in particular). In my experience management sees the bench strength fading and becoming nothing, but then will do nothing to fix even if the wider industry is fading.

I think your point would be filed using the third rule. Jack Welch style management concerns might ought to be considered irrelevant.

What’s Jack Welch management style in your eyes?

I know only a little about his history at GE. And I don’t have any reason to defend the guy, just curious what the view is these days.

Extreme focus on the stock price and thus highly short term thinking. The accountants run the show and try to aggressively cut costs at every corner which works really well in the short term, but over time the company gets decimated and nobody can take the bigger product risks that allow a company to continue to evolve.

Moved the corporate headquarters from Pittsfield, MA. To Rockefeller center NYC. It’s be more than a generation and Pittsfield is still adjusting.

tl;dr: Keep cutting costs way past the point where it kills the ability to innovate, maintain quality, or survive an unexpected shift in the business. Cover that with low-bidder outsourcing until that fails. Meanwhile hit the talk shows (on media where your company is an advertiser), have a book ghostwritten, and buy naming rights to a business school. Have your acolytes form a cult (Lean Six Sigma) with toxic group dynamics ("black belt" inquisitors and "green belt" minions vs everyone else).

This doesn't sound the world I live in. There's been insane innovation over the last 50 years. I don't think we can say that what you describe is common.

That's because businesses that innovate, or that have consistent high quality, don't operate like GE did under Jack Welch. Reverence for him and his supposed management principles is still commonplace, though not as much as in the 1990s.

Okay, but the context was:

> with Jack Welch style management everywhere

If it's not everywhere, it's worth mentioning that this is a boogeyman people cite rather than a reality.

References;

1) Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch

2) Was Jack Welch the Greatest C.E.O. of His Day—or the Worst? by Malcolm Gladwell - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/07/was-jack-welch...

3) Short-term profits and long-term consequences — did Jack Welch break capitalism? in Npr - https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits...

4) What Jack Welch Got Wrong (Just About Everything) by David Gelles (author) - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-jack-welch-got-wrong-jus...

He was dubbed "Neutron Jack" (a reference to the Neutron Bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact. He was the main reason USA lost its manufacturing base and completely screwed up how Management was/is practiced.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The US commercial environment experienced a bit of a step change in 1971 - and, realistically, probably a lead up of pressure before that date.

A bit of systems thinking and it is probably not fair to say he is "the main reason". He was the first executive who figured out how to get best results in what at the time would have been a poorly understood new regulatory world that rewarded of financialisation.

Seems somewhat legitimate, though I'd prefer more log graphs, linear scales can be misleading. Perhaps the Hakone Maru in 1968, the first TEU container ship (I think), was a harbinger.

A lot of that page builds a lot of point about specific time in order to sell the idea about dropping the unviable gold standard (in the form of Bretton-Woods system) as the real culprit.

I don't like to think in absolutes, so I was a little hyperbolic when I said he was responsible for the failure. You're probably right that it would have gradually happened anyway, but my limited understanding is he became the celebrity face to it that legitimized it and made it the defacto strategy. He is more than a little responsible for the mess we're in.

You might find Corbato's paper A Managerial View of the Multics System Development interesting - https://www.multicians.org/managerial.html

Some nice pearls of wisdom in here.

Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

From the title I was expecting a discussion of physical building subsystems, like HVAC and elevators.

I hear you, since I spend half my free time fixing stuff that breaks on my house and its contents.

I think the same principles apply. I would argue the second point that value's metaphors allows. Demonstrates how malleable the technique is.

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