Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

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If you are a CEO you should be asking this question: "How many people in this company can unilaterally destroy our entire business model?"

In high tech this can get really messy, these are frequently inherently more fragile companies. My favorite example is from Robert X. Cringley in this great book: http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-Co... ; from memory:

One day Intel's yields suddenly went to hell (that's the ratio of working die on a wafer to non-working, and is a key to profitability). And no matter how hard they tried, they could only narrow it down to the wafers being contaminated, but the wafer supplier swore up and down they were shipping good stuff, and they were. So eventually they tasked a guy to follow packages from the supplier all the way to the fab lines, and he found the problem in Intel's receiving department. Where a clerk was breaking open the sealed packages and counting out the wafers on his desk to make damned sure Intel was getting its money worth....

His point is that you can have a Fortune 500 company, normally thought to be stable companies that won't go "poof" without ample warning, in which there are many more people than in previous kinds of companies who can very quickly kill it dead.

I physically cringed at that. Even the mail clerk should have noticed there was a 'big deal' about clean rooms and had some idea what the company he worked for did...

We are all born naked, bloody, and screaming; the only thing we know is how to work a nipple. Everything else has to be learned.

One of Toyota's mantras is "If the student has failed to learn, the teacher has failed to teach." Their point is that managers are responsible for solving issues that come from employee ignorance, not line workers.

Exactly. In my organization I know of perfectly good hardware that is either being tossed or used for non-critical applications because someone didn't follow the Incoming Inspection process correctly. It doesn't matter that they could simply be inspected now and found to be perfect, the process wasn't followed, so the product is "junk."

Babies have to learn how to work a nipple, it's not some innate human knowledge.

We may be quibbling over definitions. But do you believe that no mammal has an instinctual understanding of using nipples? Or that humans are unique among mammals in that regard?

I'm afraid I have no idea about the answer to either of your questions. I assumed the "we" in your original post meant "we humans".

I do understand that humans don't have an instinctual understanding of using nipples, human babies have a physical sucking reflex that kicks in when you put anything near their mouths. They usually quickly learn that sucking a nipple in a particular way gives out lots of yummy milk.

Where a clerk was breaking open the sealed packages and counting out the wafers on his desk to make damned sure Intel was getting its money worth....

I find this hard to believe. At some point a person in a space suit was introducing them into a clean room; she should have noticed that the packages were not sealed.

Maybe the clerk was carefully sealing them back up again? In retrospect they probably should have had tamper-proof seals given the value attached to the wafers being delivered unopened, but then most problems are easily avoidable in retrospect.

Exactly; this happened early enough in the history of ICs that I'm sure they weren't taking such precautions, just like tamper revealing seals for over the counter drugs didn't become big until after the Chicago Tylenol murders.

There's a good chance a tamper revealing seal would have stopped the clerk from opening the containers, and of course it they'd been broken before reaching the people at the fab lines who were supposed to open them that would have clued Intel into the problem before any went into production and would have allowed them to quickly trace the problem back upstream.

Seems like sabotage.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor)

Or in this case energy, ignorance, and not learning enough of the big picture, or wondering why these wafers were sealed in air tight containers in the first place.

It's the well meaning mistakes that tend to be the most dangerous since most people are of good will, or at least don't want to kill the company and lose their jobs.

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