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Rickover's Lessons

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122 pointspepys100 comments

We don't have time machines and so can't re-run the experiment. I've read biographies of Rickover and not all people who lived through this time are complementary.

It's certainly true the strategic arms processes and nuclear submarine engineering benefited in a long term view.

I just find myself asking if the US army recruiting tag line Be The Best You Can Be was really met, or if Rickover achieved what might be more akin to crystallography "local optimum" where there are better peaks out there, but this one is mine. (To borrow another army concept)

Viewed from Australia the current state of US submarine construction is woeful. We're on the brink of being ripped off having prepaid for access to Virginia class subs soon, and AUKUS subs in future. We expect to be told we cannot have Virginia class subs ever, we cannot have longterm crewing or command ever, but we can host them retained in US HANDS and we can continue to pay for them.

Not that Rickover made that happen, but whatever his lessons are, the US submarine building industry doesn't seem to have learned then, or be able to apply them.

> I just find myself asking if the US army recruiting tag line Be The Best You Can Be was really met

Why would an army saying be relevant to an Admiral in the Navy?

Rickover famously asked Jimmy carter in an interview: "Did You Do Your Best?"

Carter replied: "No, sir, I didn’t always do my best."

And Rickover asked "why not?"

This significantly impacted Jimmy Carter and eventually became the title of a book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/645520.Why_Not_the_Best_

I think GP is probably pattern matching a bit too much. It's plausibly connected, but I doubt it.

Yeah, feels like lazy pattern-matching. The top-level reply mixes context across decades and doesn't support its criticism with concrete evidence.

IMHO, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover article is a much more balanced take.

He died in 1986, so everything in the Virginia program happened well after his death. His forced retirement in 1982 was largely because he made a lot of political enemies by making a stink about General Dynamic's flaws in workmanship on the Los Angeles class. His whole management style was to push for accountability and sweat the details.

I think what you're country is seeing is general flaws in quality for basically everything American-made these days. Which, if I'm being totally blunt, are because Americans are lazy and don't care about quality and basically do the minimum that won't get them fired. Hell, I started my career caring about quality and craftmanship and now I do the minimum that won't get me fired too, because there's no point busting your ass for some lazy manager up the chain to take credit for it.

Rickover's final testimony to congress in 1982 speaks about this:

Corporate Power A preoccupation with the so-called bottom line of profit and loss statements, coupled with a lust for expansion, is creating an environment in which fewer businessmen honor traditional values; where responsibility is increasingly disassociated from the the exercise of power; where skill in financial manipulation is valued more than actual knowledge and experience in the business; where attention and effort is directed mostly to short-term considerations, regardless of longer-range consequences.

Political and economic power is increasingly being concentrated among a few large corporations and their officers - power they can apply against society, government and individuals. Through their control of vast resources, these large corporations have become, in effect, another branch of government. They often exercise the power of government, but without the checks and balances inherent in our democratic system.

With their ability to dispense money, officials of large corporations may often exercise greater power to influence society than elected or appointed government officials - but without assuming any of the responsibilities and without being subject to public scrutiny. Woodrow Wilson warned that economic concentration could ''give to a few men a control over the economic life of the country which they might abuse to the undoing of millions of men.'' His stated purposes was: ''to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried in our hearts.'' His comments are apropos today.

Summary: https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Articles/rickover.html Full testimony: https://www.jec.senate.gov/reports/97th%20Congress/Economics...

There's a quip about organizing sales orgs that resonates with me:

Expect every salesperson in your company to optimize their own compensation. If you want to change their behavior, then change your sales compensation plan to drive the behavior you want.

I don't think this is appreciated enough at the management and CEO level of engineering-based companies.

How many engineering-tied metrics were explicitly part of Boeing's CEO's comp plan? If "Boeing makes less money, but produces safer planes" = more money to the CEO, then that happens.

And yet we're suprised when, absent that, individuals act in their own self interest and optimize for bad engineering outcomes.

This expands to any department, or really any human activity.

I had an econ teacher who loved the phrase Rules, Incentives, Action, Outcome. She even had pens with RIAO printed out for students. The meaning is that each step led inevitably to the other, but also that you could start at the outcome end, and work your way backwards to what rules created that outcome.

Sales organizations are often the most game-theoretic rational folks in an organization: a large fraction of their compensation is directly attributable to recent efforts.

That doesn't make them honest or efficient or trustworthy, just canny and responsive.

By way of contrast, operations can only be seen negatively (if things are working, that's normal, and if things are not, that's bad) and development usually has conflicting incentives (stability! and features! and responsiveness! and bugfixes!) with cycle times and group responsibilites obscuring attribution.

This is why founder mode "works".. it is a way to overcome game theory* .

(I hope that does not mean that resurrecting George Washington is necessary)

*At least in the von Neumann-Morgenstern style

Most of the powerful corporations in 1982 no longer exist or are much smaller because there is great turnover in corporate power. Governments don't lose power unless they lose a war, a rare event today that was common 100 years ago.

Especially look at military contractors, which consolidated significantly since the early 1990s, an intentional change desired by the Department of Defense.

> Governments don't lose power unless they lose a war, a rare event today that was common 100 years ago.

A good point, but of course they do lose power with every election - that's the point, a peaceful transition of power.

The USSR would like to enter the chat, but is unable to for existential reasons unrelated to combat.

(Also much of the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and others around the world.)

> reasons unrelated to combat.

Afghanistan is very much a reason why they no longer exist.

One of many modest-sized if not necessarily small cuts. But Afghanistan did not, say, defeat and invade the Soviet Union.

It out-endured them within its own territory. Much as has happened to the US several times, with resulting embarrassment but not regime change.

Military spending on the part of the US, falling global oil prices, multiple internal contradictions and failures, revolt within Warsaw Pact states, and growing internal dissent were far more significant contributors to the ultimate fall.

Britannica and World Atlas give similar accounts:

<https://www.britannica.com/story/why-did-the-soviet-union-co...>

<https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-reasons-for-the-colla...>

I have very little sympathy towards the Soviet empire, but the war remained on the Afghan side of the border, and was of a limited scope for most of its duration; construing the Soviet defeat into a direct cause of regime collapse is an extraordinary claim warranting extraordinary proof.

For example, one wouldn't claim that the de-facto American loss of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is directly affecting the stability of the American regime, would they?

Coming back to the Soviets, I would concur to a claim that the Afghan War was a failed national project, alongside the Chernobyl tragedy and the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea. The narrative I think proper here is first and foremost is the ordinary Soviet citizen's loss of trust in the Soviet way as such, rather than the specific fear of a foreign invasion.

"governments" may not, but the political parties running them certainly do. And changes in political parties can change what services government delivers. Heck, you don't even need a change in parties for that to happen.

“Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome.” -- Charlie Munger

In other words, if you want to solve a problem you need to align the incentives. If you don't your solution is likely to fail, especially on larger scales.

"measurement disfunction" - measuring something your people do leads to it being the only thing the people do. And some things are hard to measure. When the decided they could make trams run on time by giving penalties to drivers who were late, trams stopped stopping for passengers. True story. Leadership (vision) and arranging for resources to get the job done - that is, I think, the moral of the Rickover story.

> Which, if I'm being totally blunt, are because *American managers* are lazy and don't care about quality and basically do the minimum that won't get them fired.

FTFY.

I care but I am not allowed to. VC only cares about numbers that are larger then previous numbers. They hire management who tells us to make the numbers go up. those numbers go up with production so production is king. Production can be increased with a decrease in quality if we degrade the process or improving the process preserving quality. Improvement takes time and money - two hard things. So degrade it is. It's cheap, fast, and makes management look like a super star. If management doesn't give a shit, why should you?

If your n+1 doesn’t give a shit, why should you stay and enable this carelessness?

Because you get paid no matter what. edit: to add, this is a recent development so of course I am looking to leave.

Very valid reason. But beware that it does not weigh on you and burn you out. Been there several times. It always hurts, but I should have left even earlier each time.

Point taken, though I'd like to charitably think Americans are 'lazy' the way Haskell is lazy or Japanese Kanban or Jidoka is lazy. As MisterTea points out, the VCs invest in metrics, management pushes on metrics, and productive engineers deliver metrics at the cost of bugs and tech debt. Then we engineers wait for bug reports to percolate down, and we respond only as needed. On Sundays we repent by writing elegant high-quality code that nobody uses. We feel deeply that something is wrong.

The AUKUS deal is just Australia shovelling money at the US and getting four fifths of fuck all in return, but that's purely for political reasons.

Yeah it's basically paying the US for protection.

I don't blame them though because they do have a whole country full of about 15 times as many space-constrained citizens next door (Indonesia)

That calculus must change with the new administration

Yes, just like it does with the EU.

And yes we didn't spend so much on defense as Trump says, but(!) America never really wanted us to be too powerful. They were really happy to play top dog, obviously the more powerful we are as EU, the more viable a geopolitical opponent we are. The US have never really been too happy with nuclear capabilities in Europe and this is the main thing that deters agressors like Russia. Even the UK's is largely built by the US like the Polaris missiles.

Yup, this is how collective security system works. It is far from perfect, but it managed to keep the World in more or less peace for pretty long time. We had wars, sometimes bloody, but still local once.

The corner stone of this system is nuclear weapons nonproliferation. This is, on one hand, unjust - why Australia cannot have its own nuclear arsenal and not be dependent on USA to give them protection? But on the other hand, though, think what would happen if we didn't have proliferation and every second African country had nukes (e.g. Yemen Houthis, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, etc.).

How Algeria would resolve, say, Algerian-Spanish their territorial dispute if Algeria had nukes and Spain did not?

This system is certainly not perfect, but it worked, we'll see if it will work in future.

The way things are going, we're likely to see how things turn out without the global nonproliferation system. I'm not looking forward to it.

The current US administration isn't much interested in understanding how the system works, they are focused on the $$, which is what they do understand. Putting billionaires in charge of government is maybe not such a good thing.

It binds the two countries together, over the long term, in countering China. There's also a 'track 2' program that brings in other countries in the region.

Countering the Soviet Union in Europe had the advantage that the countries were accustomed to an existing alliance and working together. In the western Pacific, South Korea, Japan, the Philipines, Australia, etc. are not at all used to working together. Many are traditional enemies with long-termm animus. And the distances are enormous.

The top US foreign policy goal since 2020, arguably, has been to bind them together with each other and with the US to counter China. The US has been amazingly successful for such a short time, but it's still far from NATO levels of integration.

> I've read biographies of Rickover and not all people who lived through this time are complementary.

History is written by those who remain in power and Rickover was a man who embodied speaking truth to power. His career was largely ended when some corporate powers he spoke truth to finally punished him for his opposition.

> but whatever his lessons are

Rickover was very forward about his lessons: https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm

Near the end of his career he mainly wanted to spend time promoting his own philosophies, however his anti "power" message was obscured via political spectacle and threatening corporate power ensured that those that wrote the history books made sure his accomplishments and philosophy faded into obscurity.

Fantastic article on leadership - thanks for linking to it

I would just make sure that you read this article to complement it: https://quietwarriors.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/...

I had not heard of Captain Schratz until now, but what I did find of him [0] makes me think that he may have had it out for Rickover:

> During [the 1960s], Schratz believed, he lost his opportunity for major command because he published a facetious story in 1963 about Vice Admiral H. G. Rickover's burial plans.

Furthermore, he either is unaware of, or elides parts of stories that would refute his implications:

> Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology.

The S2G reactor used in the Seawolf (SSN-575, not SSN-21) was, to quote Rickover, “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” First of all, you're running liquid sodium as a coolant; famously, sodium and water are not friends. Second of all, this choice now puts a hard limit on the time you have at sea to be shutdown for emergent repairs, maintenance, etc., because if the plant temperature drops below (or even near, realistically) the melting point of sodium (admittedly fairly low, at ~98 C), you're now stuck.

So I think it's less that the "obvious superiorities" were left alone due to fear of Rickover's wrath, and more because no one wants a cantankerous and potentially explosive reactor in the middle of the boat they're operating.

Similarly:

> When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.

The Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was fast. Really fast. During initial sea trials, she outran her escort [1], which had a listed top speed of 34 knots. And she can maintain that effectively indefinitely. I see no reason why other proposals _should_ be investigated.

But it's this line that really paints the picture:

> The cult of personality and the dominance of the Rickover program tended increasingly to isolate the nuclear Navy officers from the real Navy.

"the real Navy." And there we have it. A bitter officer, angry that he was passed over at even a chance for nuclear command, lashing out at the fact that the organization's newest shiny toys got all the attention.

It was and I'm sure remains a common complaint while I was in that nukes stay in their own world, that they don't participate in general work like stores loads (which is bullshit; I definitely did my share of them), etc. Our retort was always "I'll trade my $5/day propay for your schedule," and no one ever took us up on it (propay is the method by which the Navy gives additional pay for certain jobs; all nuclear trained personnel get $150/month extra, with qualified supervisors getting $450/month extra – also, there are non-nuclear personnel who receive more, like the Assistant Navigator).

During my time at Electric Boat while my boat was being built, I was frequently in shift work. Navy nuclear shift work is ostensibly 8 hours, with 3 shifts, but by the time you factor in pre-shift training, pre-shift brief, shift handover, post-shift cleanup, and any other administrative actions deemed necessary, it's about 12 hours. 12 hours a day (or night, more accurately – I was on the midshift), 7 days a week, for months. Zero days off. The non-nuclear personnel, in contrast, were not in shift work, and since all of their equipment didn't exist yet, their job mostly consisted of showing up to the building we had assigned, puttering around for a few hours, and calling it a day. And yet, their leadership would harangue us during the brief time we spent passing each other for petty details like boots not being shined, uniform being wrinkled, etc. So yes, nukes generally develop a hatred of non-nukes, while the non-nukes often regard nukes as being elitists.

> Nuclear enlisted men never stand nonengineering watches, rarely if ever help load stores and weapons, never have mess-cook duty. As a result, second-class petty officers from the "front end" pull mess-cook duty, serving nuclear-trained third class from the engineering department.

Not only do we not stand non-engineering watches, if we try to qualify for them, we're told no, because "it would demoralize the other watchstanders," quoth a non-nuke Chief to my buddy when he went for the final checkouts on a non-nuke watch station. Apparently demonstrating that someone's job is actually incredibly easy, and they're just not that great at it is mean.

We absolutely load stores; see previous comment. We absolutely do not load weapons, but then again, nor does anyone else who isn't in the weapons department. This is an absurd strawman. Finally, while I'm sure it depends on the command, on my boat, nukes had to crank (mess duty). Joke's on the crew, though; we viewed it as a vacation. You mean all I have to do is wash dishes and listen to music, or serve food a few times a day? Sign me up! Also, at least on submarines, rank doesn't really matter. Generally, E1-E6 can all talk shit to each other, and if you're good at your job, you can talk shit to O1-O3 and get away with it, maybe at most getting a reprimand from the Engineering Officer (who is an O4). In fact, even the nukes would be delighted when we got a JSI (Junior Staff Instructor; some students who graduate the final part of training are extended an offer to stay for 2 years as a sort of initial shore duty, and as part of this, they frequently manage to hit E-6 by the time they're at their first command) who was too big for their britches. I distinctly remember a fully qualified E-2 A-Ganger (auxiliary mechanic, non-nuclear) yelling at our brand new non-qualified E-6 to stop reading a book and qualify something so he'd be useful. The guy tried pulling the "you can't talk to me like that..." card, which was immediately shot down by everyone around him, including the nukes. Your ability, which is formalized in your qualifications, is the only thing that matters.

I'm not denying that Rickover was abrasive, nor that he had little to no regard for the chain of command, Naval tradition, etc. Nor am I saying he didn't have his ethical problems – he absolutely did, especially near the end of his career. However, IMO he had good reason for his beliefs, he created a legacy that still stands, and he advanced the USN into the 21st century.

[0]: https://www.usni.org/press/oral-histories/schratz-paul

[1]: https://usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil/Recent/Article-View/...

Thanks for the enlightening response.

Thanks for the in-depth research; I should have done similar.

Your experience mirrors mine, down to the cranking being a vacation.

As I alluded to elsewhere I ended up outside Engineering for a substantial part of my career. Amusingly towards the end of my career I was offered a leadership position in the Engineering Department (I was in the Aviation Department, and this was an LHA) due to my background and my reputation within weeks of transferring onboard. It was unheard of, and there were some interesting meetings in the CPO Mess and Wardroom that I was involved in for that, but I ended up not taking it because I simply didn't want the hours.

> Viewed from Australia the current state of US submarine construction is woeful.

It was great for the War on Terror era, when submarines were only useful against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS aircraft carriers. :) Spending money on subs, which includes staffing, operating, and maintaining them, was a waste.

Now the US needs to build capacity, which takes time. It turns out that getting the next AI startup moving is faster than building new nuclear submarine manufacturing facilities, training workers, creating supply lines, and building subs. MVPs generally are not good for submarine warfare.

> MVPs generally are not good for submarine warfare.

I've heard enough stories that makes me feel like there are plenty of examples of the PoC rushed to production level experiences with various military equipment.

To address it seriously: If they rush the PoC, the result is more problems and in life-and-death, national security situations, and people complain. If they are more careful, people complain about the beaurocracy holding back the military, with all their requirements for proper specifications, testing, etc.

It's a pendulum many people in tech deal with. But I resent seeing officials, who know better, taking one side or the other in order to always criticize the people doing the hard work of managing these very complex, often cutting-edge projects.

At one point, for at least some projects, the Department of Defense elimated the professional managers and had military officers manage their projects directly. What could go wrong?

I was talking to someone who worked at McKinsey and they told me about the pains that the consulting group took to assure everyone that they were the "best and the brightest." That everyone working there was brilliant — assuredly. And they'd stand around, gassing each other up and sharing these stats... "Top 3% of their graduating class!!!"

If you've watched Game of Thrones (before it lost the plot), you might be aware of the moment where one of the characters turns around to a petulant, teen tyrant-king and says, "Any man who must say, 'I am the King,' is no true king." I think that statement rings true for McKinsey and the obsession a lot of companies have with "hiring the best."

Admiral Rickover was a true king; i.e., the opposite. He didn't hire the "best." No, he hired people with extraordinary potential and then worked with them to develop their potential.

The theater with the chair and his hiring practises were filters to find people with agency whom he could teach how to be capable and smart. I wonder what the modern equivalent is today.

Side note, almost exactly a year ago (~51 weeks), I edited together a video of him talking about how there aren't any extraordinary people waiting to be hired; https://x.com/1517fund/status/1775253578916974606

> without cost overruns

That's downright un-American!

I love hearing stories about him. One that I have heard, a couple of times, is that a salesgoblin went into his second-floor office at the Pentagon, with a sample of some electronic equipment.

Rickover is said to have grabbed the device, walked over to his window, and dropped it to the ground beneath. He then said something along the lines of "If it still works, we can talk."

That's kind of along the lines of something I heard that Steve Jobs did to the iPhone prototype. He threw it in the fish tank and said, all those bubbles are wasted space. Could be this is an urban legend though.

I heard the same story about a Japanese consumer electronics executive with a prototype of the first compact video camera.

President Carter served under Admiral Rickover. He was even sent to lead the cleanup of a reactor meltdown.

https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history/2025/february/c...

Yeah Carter was a really sound guy. Smart and honest. Even after leaving the presidency he negotiated for peace all over the world. I think he doesn't deserve the bad rep he got.

If there's anyone who could have made America "great" it's him. Of course I'm not American so I know I'm butting in where I don't belong..

His presidency was a shambles.

But Carter is far and away the 2nd best ex-president the US ever had (Geo. Washington gets the 1st place nod for choosing to set the custom)

He was in over his head as President, but he was still a good man, which is more than many other ex-Presidents from both parties could say.

I think that's the myth promoted by his opponents, to win the 1980 election and of course to demonize all Democrats and other enemies.

But forget all that and examine it on the merits: As a start, he inherited the post-Vietname military, a shambles already, OPEC embargos, Iran, an America that had lost great credibility in Vietnam. He did Camp David, the most successful and effective security action in the Mideast to this day; began deregulation (yes it was him, not Reagan); put Paul Volcker in the Fed and signed the relevant legislation to get inflation under control; implemented the new all-volunteer military; was right about energy policy, ...

> implemented the new all-volunteer military

The USA switched to a volunteer force 3 years before Carter was elected. What he did do, was re-establish draft registration. Not something one should brag about.

Author of Chinatalk post here!

If you want to read the full write-up of the story of Rickover and the USS Nautilus, you can find my original substack here: https://charlesyang.substack.com/p/how-hyman-rickover-built-...

I'm also planning on doing some archival research through the Rickover Files at US Naval Academy Archives, so if there are particular topics that are of interest about Rickover's legacy, let me know! Currently planning on prioritizing congressional testimony and unpublished memos or speeches that he gave.

In general any observations about how he was able to convince congress / government of the potential of a nuclear navy. He doesn't come across as a necessarily easy person to deal with in many contexts and it's always felt like there's a missing link in explaining his effectiveness at getting what he wanted. I mean he went from being someone the navy wanting gone to probably the most famous/influential naval figure in history and largely through maneuvering outside of the organization. But how?

I also would love if you find anything out about his interactions with Takis Veliotis in the 80s (who if you don't know about, feel free to message me or see my submission on).

>>> Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. A manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory.”

~ Hyman Rickover, 1982

Gene Kim talks about Rickover quite a bit on the Idealcast podcast. This episode[1] with Michael Nygard has a great story where he shares a memo that Rickover wrote to the representatives that he had at contractor sites. (The context is people in The Naval Reactor Organization or NR, granting waivers to their contractors from NR rules):

> From time to time, I note evidence that NR representatives at field offices, such as a shipyard or laboratory, do not fully understand their primary mission. It is amazing to me how representatives new to these positions uniformly get themselves into the frame of mind, where they conceive of themselves as intermediaries between NR and the contractor. That is, that their job is to judge who is right, NR or the contractor, and then make the decision on their own. In many cases, not even notifying NR. In this way, the NR representative then becomes in effect NR's boss. All NR representatives are of course, encouraged to state their views to me at any time, but it is not their job to assume my responsibility. Another and more serious mistake arises when the NR representative decides what he should or should not report to me. Frequently, he decides not to report things to me because he feels he can handle the matter better himself or he is afraid that by notifying me of the situation, which is his job, I will take ignorant, improper action and upset the applecart. Nearly all NR representatives have had inadequate experience to handle the important and complex tasks they face. I do not expect them to be able to make wise decisions on all matters by themselves. Under some circumstances, it is better to have no NR representative at all because I would not then be lulled into thinking the NR interests are being taken care of. Please bear in mind always that you are the NR representative. That you are to carry out the policies of NR. That you are not to judge NR or to represent the contractor to NR. To achieve the status of a true NR representative requires the acquisition of godlike qualities, but you can try. Signed H.G. Rickover.

[1] https://itrevolution.com/podcast/the-idealcast-episode-10/

> Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients.

I love this quote.

tech could seriously learn from his other quote:

> I did not recruit extraordinary people. I recruited people who had extraordinary potential—and then I trained them.

I'm a former USN Submariner, Nuclear Electronics Technician, and served from 2006 - 2016. Boy do I have some thoughts. Not all quotes here are from TFA, some are from various speeches he gave.

> Free discussion requires an atmosphere unembarrassed by any suggestion of authority or even respect.

This has always been an interesting idea to implement at tech companies. I've not yet been reprimanded for it, but I have definitely gotten raised eyebrows when the CEO or some other higher-up makes a statement, then pauses for replies. It seems like management isn't expecting anyone to do anything other than applaud.

> Responsibility is a unique concept. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.

This is my number one source of frustration in tech, specifically in incident management / retrospectives. Companies have fully latched onto blamelessness in such a way that obliterates any responsibility. There is a difference between blaming a person for causing a problem, and holding a person accountable for their actions. The former usually also implies a disinterest in finding and fixing the root cause, instead looking for a scapegoat. That is flawed thinking that will not yield positive results. However, it's also patently absurd to pretend that when Bob has caused 3 of the last SEV0s, Bob isn't at least related to the problem. "We need more guardrails," they'll say, and implement automated checks to prevent the specific issue. I have no problem with guardrails, but what bothers me is when the guardrails become so onerous that it's difficult to do my job, and the bottom line is no one is holding Bob accountable. If you are careless with your work, no amount of guardrails will fix that; the problem is you.

> I am not satisfied with bringing an individual to a qualified level once, and then forgetting about him. Therefore, we continually reinforce theoretical and practical training with a continuing training program. This includes frequent practice in plant evolutions and casualty drills.

As much as any sailor hated drills, you can't deny that they work. I was jolted awake once by the sound of the collision alarm, followed by the announcement of flooding. While it turned out that it wasn't flooding, but merely a "controlled seawater leak," (someone messed up a rig for dive and left a valve open; that's an entirely different discussion), the fact remains that everyone knew where they needed to go, and what they needed to do.

Companies, especially / mostly ops-related departments, should practice scenarios. DR, loss of a K8s cluster, whatever. If you've automated everything, terrific; find something new that you haven't automated, and see if people know how to deal with it. This leads me to my next point: understanding fundamentals.

> I recall once several years ago an Admiral, whose conventionally powered ships were suffering serious engineering problems, asked me for a copy of one specific procedure I used to identify equipment which was not operating properly. He believed that would solve his problem, but it did not. That Admiral did not have the vaguest understanding of the problem or how to solve it, he was merely searching for a simple answer, a check off list, that he hoped would magically solve his problem.

and

> One of the elements needed in solving a complex technical problem is to have the individuals who make the decisions trained in the technology involved. A concept widely accepted in some circles is that all you need is to get a college degree in management and then, regardless of the technical subject, you can apply your management techniques to run any program...

Rickover understood that in order to operate things, you have to understand how they work. To this end, the training pipeline for my job began with basic algebra, in order to assure a baseline level of knowledge, and then proceeded through the structure of an atom, electrons, PN junctions, diodes, transistors, and logic circuits, before finally learning a great deal about the CPU (Motorola 68000 when I was a student; I was part of the curriculum overhaul years later to "modernize" it to the Intel 386) at the logic signal level. All this, to operate with massive layers of abstraction. But critically, that fundamental knowledge is there. We could, if absolutely necessary, troubleshoot a logic board (which are simply specialized computers) down to the component level, and desolder / resolder the new one.

Tech largely operated in this manner for decades by necessity. If you asked how to do something, you were told to RTFM. If you instead said, "I read section x.y.z but don't understand what it means," there was a much better chance of someone offering guidance. The onus was on you to understand enough of your current layer to apply it to the abstraction above. Instead, we now have vibe coding, and people pushing PRs having neither written nor tested any of the code. We have people copy/pasting error messages into Slack and asking what they mean, instead of taking the 10 seconds required to read it. We have people who have successfully memorized Leetcode, but who can't apply any of that knowledge to real-world problems.

Rickover was an asshole, but he had an extremely transparent and level requirement of all his employees: know your job inside and out. If you didn't, he would destroy you.

There _has_ to be a middle ground somewhere that modern companies could strive towards.

As is pointed out in the article I linked elsewhere in the comments he should’ve remembered what he said about responsibility when the Thresher happened.

You seem to harp on this every single time Rickover is brought up, but I'll make two points:

I can't find evidence of that call anywhere but your single cited source, and that source does not cite it.

He immediately completely overhauled procedures to prevent a reoccurrence of what they thought the most likely issue with the plant, if it did cause the sinking.

Another previous Submarine Nuclear ET here.

I agree with you, and it's interesting to look back and realize how many of my outspoken opinions and ideals are simply due to internalizing Rickover's Philosophies. I agree with them, sometimes to my detriment.

I actually had to leave both the Submarine and Nuclear world after an injury, but stayed on in the Aviation and Expeditionary Warfare world until I hit 22 years. I cannot tell you how many times I made enemies by insisting on his lessons in those communities, but I got results. Enough so that I had to fight to retire; they wanted me to stay as long as they could hold me and stick me in another problem spot.

One example that may apply for those on this site (and I'm not trying to make this example for YOU, this is just one I hammer on) is the practice of just pulling in a ton of dependancies without understanding what they do, what you are trying to do, etc. I get that things need to move faster in business to make a profit, but I cannot and will not condone that type of philosophy. Look at the recent slew of compromises due to exactly this behavior, the ballooning system requirements due to it, etc. LLM coding is another such issue; we are going to have a ton of programmers who have no idea how to structure something from a plain sheet of paper, who can't trace down issues in complex code because they don't even know how to read it and chart program flow, etc.

You and I are fully aligned with your example bugbear, fellow Bubblehead.

> Rickover understood that in order to operate things, you have to understand how they work....

"Tech largely operated in this manner for decades by necessity. If you asked how to do something, you were told to RTFM. If you instead said, "I read section x.y.z but don't understand what it means," there was a much better chance of someone offering guidance. The onus was on you to understand enough of your current layer to apply it to the abstraction above. Instead, we now have vibe coding, and people pushing PRs having neither written nor tested any of the code. We have people copy/pasting error messages into Slack and asking what they mean, instead of taking the 10 seconds required to read it. We have people who have successfully memorized Leetcode, but who can't apply any of that knowledge to real-world problems."

More than a rant, that is an idea that needs to be more fully developed. For now, it's worth thinking about how tools such as Google, Stack Overflow and now LLMs have made it possible for system complexity to exceed what the people working on it can understand. There used to be an effective upper limit on API complexity from the limits of the human brain. That's been passed. This may or may not be a good thing.

I'd have to go back and look through back issues of the New London Day to get any details, but having grown up in the area (graduated high school in '82) I seem to recall that he may have stayed in his position for a number of years past his sell-by date.

missing from the account is just how much rickover was hated internally by the navy, until he wasn't. IIRC his office was in converted women's room in the pentagon.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel," as Maya Angelou has it.

Rickover, for all his delivery talents, apparently made a good proportion of people feel like shit.

i don't think that's really it. he was hated because of his interactions with his superiors, not generally because of how he treated people below him.

The quote applies to everyone!

No, pretty much everyone hated him.

His best lesson, in my opinion: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

His writing style is very good, and he succinctly summarizes the phenomenon where a technology that is substantially complete to the point that it has known issues is looked down upon while a technology that is purely "on paper" (the "paper reactor" as he calls it) is treated as a good alternative, since the paper technology isn't far enough along for the problems to even be known. That's not even a good TL;DR, so you should just read Rickover's essay.

It's like the current situation with "vibe coding". An LLM can build you something which demonstrates a principle in some kind of hand-wavy fashion, but the gap between the thing produced by the LLM and a sustainable product is just huge. And, as with the gap between Rickover's paper reactor and his practical reactor, it's often extraordinary difficult to explain to a non-specialist why that is so -- because the difference is all in the detail.

That's a good analogy!

A lot of the bubbles in our field have been like that.

His bust is at the entrance of the engineering building, Ricker Hall, at USNA.

The nose is a bright gold-ish hue against the brown of the rest as the Midshipment rub it for luck on their way to exams.

Which never afforded me much, alas.

Um.

I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.

To the article's credit, it does touch on this aspect of his management style. But engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ generations. A lot of that just would not fly. I chuckle thinking about the shock and surprise on the average HN'ers face when one morning they come in and find out they're fired because a hypothetical "Rickover" did a code review last night and found a long existing bug they didn't fix yet.

And keep in mind, this hypothetical "Rickover" would review your code, and that of all your reports, every night. He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too.

It's harsh. I'm not sure today's Americans are ready for that?

yeah but this hypothetical rickover wouldn't also be the same person constantly telling them to put off fixing the bug to build out a feature that the nontechnical product manager thinks customers want.

> I don't know how many people on HN have served and heard of Rickover? But I'm pretty sure most people on HN could not function in a Rickover style management context. It gets things done, but it's not terribly polite about going about getting them done.

Ex-Navy nuke here; I had to interview with the KOG [*] to get into The Program.

My guess is that most people on HN would do fine in a Rickover-style program — albeit likely after some culture shock. After 50 years I can still recite my own interview with the man pretty much verbatim. I served only five years on active duty; I've forgotten most of what I knew about the specific subject of nuclear engineering. But the no-bullshit, face-the-facts general management style that Rickover created and propagated in the nuclear Navy was likely the single biggest professional influence of my life. To this day I regularly quote Rickover to my law students: You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect.

And in the fleet, most of us nukes were regular people, not nearly as abrasive or peremptory as he could be.

[*] KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman: Of those four things, Rickover was at most two.

> [*] KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman: Of those four things, he was at most two.

I must not be hip to the joke. What's the fourth thing?

> I must not be hip to the joke. What's the fourth thing?

Kindly. Old. Gentle. Man.

Probably breaking it down into [ kindly, old, gentle, man ]

> He doesn't like the architecture you chose? You're gone. He finds issues in the code of one of your subordinates? That subordinate is gone and you are too.

I doubt it would have been that severe unless it was a recurring thing. But it does bring to mind a story told by the USS Enterprise's then-chief engineer, about an episode before my own time aboard. Back in the day, there was a "billet" (org-chart position) known as the "shaft officer"; those were experienced, mid-level officers, as in, late 20s to early 30s in age. Each shaft officer oversaw (IIRC) one of the ship's four propellers and its shaft, along with the specific engine room and two nuclear reactors that drove the shaft.

(Enterprise had a total of eight nuclear reactors in four numbered "plants"; each shaft officer would have been roughly equivalent to the chief engineer of a single-plant ship.)

During one Rickover visit to the Enterprise, an officer is introduced to him as the shaft officer for 3 plant. Rickover immediately asks, "You're the shaft officer? How long is your shaft?" The shaft officer could have given either of two possible answers — and either answer would have saved him — but he "failed open" and couldn't answer. Rickover supposedly de-nuked him on the spot.

The oolie to end all oolies.

Wait how are there two answers to this? Is shaft length not a well specified term?

The question "how long is your shaft" also has a more, um, personal answer ....

The two inboard shafts are one length and the two outboard shafts are another length.

I see what you're saying, but as soon as you go in the direction of "engineers today are from the Millennial or GenZ" I'm writing you off. My boomer parents were spoiled little snowflakes. I spent six years operating Rickover's reactors on US Navy submarines. I actually served on the boat that finally got Rickover fired. So I'm very qualified to say that this has absolutely nothing to do with generational pampering. Rickover's methods wouldn't work anywhere outside of the Navy during the Cold War because even there they were considered draconian and extreme (and generally nutty), and in most of the rest of the world a boss isn't allowed to literally put their employees in jail for any reason they make up.

>Rickover's methods wouldn't work anywhere outside of the Navy during the Cold War because even there they were considered draconian and extreme (and generally nutty)

What people forget is that Rickover controlled one of the largest budgets in the DoD, so there were people lining up to kiss his ass just to get a piece of that pie regardless of his behavior.

Well, seeing as Sam Altman cited him as a role model that tracks.

My favorite style is his style and I wish it was more pervasive in the tech sector. At the same time, I understand it’s not practical in today’s society in a practical sense.

I alluded to it above, but I'll say it again here: the only reason the K.O.G. was successful was because he controlled one of the largest budgets in the DoD and people were lining up to kiss his ass to get a piece of that pie regardless of his behavior.

I think you’re right, but also wrong at the same time.

I haven’t read as much as I should have on him, but from the stuff live gleaned, his personality didn’t change once he got into that position of a large budget. Sure, his persona and leadership style evolved along with him, but it was always there. It’s what got him to be what we know today.

Having read Eric Berger's Reentry about SpaceX and having a few friends who work at Tesla, my impression is that those organizations are not too dissimilar. They are also populated largely by millenial and gen Z people because older workers can't/won't deal with the hours and other working conditions.

Furthermore I think most blue collar American workers, and many white collar workers, are used to the concept of sudden and arbitrary termination.

That you are comparing Rickover's nuke program to Tesla and SpaceX kind of illustrates the cultural gap. Anyone at SpaceX ever get jailed for whatever reason his/her boss dreamed up off hand? Any analog to Skipjack at Tesla?

Think about that, today, Tesla and SpaceX are "tough" environments to people.

It's kind of a sign that a lot of people today have no idea how things worked back then. We will definitely have trouble bringing those environments back.

So why is the quality and reliability of Tesla products so bad compared to competitors? From an outside perspective it seems like Tesla engineers are generally lazy and incompetent, at least relative to an organization like Naval Reactors which maintains much higher standards.

They are not being tasked with making Toyota like reliability. That is not what made Tesla successful. Falcons are pretty reliable. With that said, Musk went crazy a few years ago and people are just now starting to realize.

I'm sorry this is getting down voted. The kayfabe surrounding Rickover and the Nuclear Navy is pretty impressive -- it's hard to find anything negative about it when you do an internet search.

For instance, you won't find any mention of the "Skipjack Skydiving Club"[1].

It would be interesting if they released statistics for the suicide rate within the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program vs. the rest of the population. Anecdotally I would guess 30x.

[1]: "Skipjack", named after a Naval Vessel, is the name of the tallest dormitory at the Goose Creek Naval Weapon's Station Nuclear Power School. I'm sure you can do the math on where the club name came from.

I have never served. I am a Millennial. I prefer Rickover's management style. I thankfully had some of the earliest managers in my career who /had/ served under Rickover and applied this management style.

Some of the things I found very comforting under this management style is:

1. Everyone would be held accountable and managers would be held accountable for their subordinates

2. Everyone was expected to actually know their job, and not just hand wave away things. It's okay to say "I don't know", but it's never okay to bullshit.

3. Outcomes trump platitudes, which means it's absolutely okay to point out the emperor has no clothes.

I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hold myself strongly accountable in a way that is rare, both in my generation /and/ in older generations. Managers trust me, even in dysfunctional organizations, because I am razor sharp about what I do know, what I reasonably believe/assume, and what I do not know, and I have no qualms whatsoever about speaking the truth to anyone, regardless of title or position. The only times I've ever been reprimanded/fired or otherwise faced career challenges with my behavior were in organizations that were participating in unethical and arguably illegal activities, otherwise I've found that nearly everyone appreciates honesty and accountability, even if it's few and far between in their larger organization.

I think you'd find that for all the ink shed about the necessity of politeness and niceness, that the kindest thing to nearly everyone in the workforce is to be honest to them, both to their face and when they are not present, and to hold them accountable in a fair and even-handed way. Being kind is not being nice, and telling the truth is not always polite, but it makes a team, organization, and the outcome (product) better when people act in this way and that is incontrovertible. Almost everyone prefers to be part of a winning team, a team that produces high quality outcomes, and can clearly point to their contributions to that outcome because they took ownership of their work, accountability for it.

The fact we /don't/ act in this way towards people in younger generations is, in my opinion, one of the reasons there's so many mental health problems and dissatisfaction with life in early adulthood. Nobody feels ownership over anything, and they feel as if they have no control over their own life or anything that surrounds it, just floating along in misery. Taking accountability is the first step to taking control, and having the deep knowledge about the things you do every single day is something that builds a confidence born out of competence that nobody can challenge unjustly. So many people in tech completely lack both competence and accountability, so it is no surprise to me that they suffer deeply due to this.

1000% to all of this, but especially this:

> I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hold myself strongly accountable in a way that is rare, both in my generation /and/ in older generations. Managers trust me, even in dysfunctional organizations, because I am razor sharp about what I do know, what I reasonably believe/assume, and what I do not know, and I have no qualms whatsoever about speaking the truth to anyone, regardless of title or position.

I've been at a few tech companies now, and what I've consistently found is that people far above me tend to respect my opinion and listen to me, while often times, people at my level or just above it resent me for having the audacity to know things, and to figure things out from first principles, and to demonstrate this ability quite publicly in incidents and the like. I think part of it is an unwillingness to be wrong, which is idiotic. I will frequently state a hypothesis, my basis and assumptions for it, and then test it. I'm sometimes wrong. This is not something to be ashamed of at all, but people seem to treat being publicly wrong as the worst imaginable outcome. So you were wrong - great, now you have more information. Continue, folding this new data into your next hypothesis.

> I don't know how many people on HN... and heard of Rickover?

Eliding "have served" -- not American, don't care.

I suspect the name is familiar to a lot of SF readers, as Rickover reactors play an important part in Kim Stanley Robinson's SF novels about the colonisation of Mars. That's where I know it from.

And even if they weren't "ready for it," what does it matter? Give me any asshole leader, no matter how accomplished, and I'll show you someone who would have been even more effective if they'd gotten down off their high horse and worked on their social skills.

Then again, I was an aviator, and find the constant lionizing of Rickover irritating. He was effective in his context, but he also wasn't perfect. And on top of that, his context is not the only one you can learn from, even in the United States Navy.

You are literally repeating the classic - "younger generation" are "negative adjective" and not as "positive adjective" as "older generation" and thus can't hack it - which has been going on since the beginning of time.

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