I will challenge anyone to equal my parade of technicians. From the guy who came in on Mondays with stitches from the weekend bar fights it only gets better. He was actually a very smart kid who could cobble together a high frequency breadboard with little or no direction.
From his anecdotes, I would blame him for the failures below him. However, I have no knowledge of the actual situation other than his short verbage. So I cannot really blame him nor anyone else.
Being employed at a prestigious physics lab does not necessarily mean one is a good manager. I do know someone who works at one of those places, and he's about as smart as a cabbage. He keeps a list.
Jn
From Wiki.. "The subsequent investigation revealed that a combination of company failures, human errors and confusion over unit measures....." and "...the fuel had been calculated in pounds instead of kilograms..."
Interesting thing is these commercial airliners glide better than one might think, they don't drop just like a rock, the glide ratio for the Gimli Boeing 767-200 is ~12, meaning for every kilometer it goes down it moves forward 12 kilometers, not bad.
Please let's ditch the Imperial system already!
btw, more often than not, people striving for top position in the corporate and political world are if not downright narcissists and psychopaths at least border personalities, a sad matter of state which can be seen everywhere around us.
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I would say more simply narcissists for sure but having no knowledge at all of the problems or technology at hand. Over the years I paid little or no attention to any management that did not have a mastery of EE at a high level. By that I mean the ones that tried to interfere in day to day operations. Psychopath is a strong word for folks that usually are just horses behinds.
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I should mention that the Gimli Glider incident all started with a broken fuel gauge card in the computer rack that wasn't fixed because stock of spare parts had not been done. No card was available, which forced this unfamiliar situation onto the crew and ground crew.
How often have we had to scramble doing something extra just because someone in stores decided spare whatevers were not required?
-Chris
How often have we had to scramble doing something extra just because someone in stores decided spare whatevers were not required?
-Chris
While emotionally I want to agree with that assessment, reality may not agree with it.
Jn
Oh man, the stories I have on that topic....
The trade off between captured dollars in stock for "possible" failure vs being able to pay salaries. A difficult decision, yet derided by those who don't bean count.
Imagine downtime costing 117,000 dollars per hour. I am glad I am not one of the bean counters.
Jn
Ps. When the "JIT" fad hit, I started stockpiling critical items...what a bunch of garbage foisted on those who do the work, by those who have no clue. Man, were we not ready for that...
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Hi George, hope all is well with you. I just passed the year mark, a difficult time.
I suspect that the concept I detailed before will take a decade more to take hold.
E/M theory is not that intuitive to most.
John
Dismissing something out of hand without researching the topic is nothing but self deception, reality disagrees.
Narcissists Tend to Become Leaders
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amymor...get-promoted-but-do-they-make-better-leaders/
Narcissism: Why It's So Rampant in Politics | Psychology Today
Cheers Michael
Psychopathy is not necessarily binary condition, it can be viewed a personality trait that some people have more of than others. It has been estimated that corporate CEO's are about twice as likely to be strongly psychopathic as members of the general population. Why? Psychopaths are usually very intelligent, and they can be quite charming when when they want to be, they are just incapable of feeling empathy for others. Maybe some advantage to having those traits for getting ahead in the corporate world.
Anyone who has had to deal with lean manufacturing would completely understand JN's lament about spare parts or spare anything for that matter that is more than six months old. I can imagine all the lower level workers who have to find methods to hide those critical parts so they have them when they actually need them in an emergency to do a job.
A lot of negative assumptions Again from others here ---
The goof-up's I told were very serious ones which no one should expect from employees. None were under my supervision or worked for me... they were often contract employees from outside companies. They were doing work for me or my group under direction of others. This should be obvious as only one was in electronics field... the EE who didn't check the motor wiring phasing. Gross negligence IMO. But, he too didn't work for me.
This kind of knee jerk reaction here re. good management practices and spins and insinuations and one-upmanship are ugly and getting really old and tiring. I didnt work in a vacuum. I had to compete with 200 others with my job title. I was ranked #2. I think this means by my peers and above - I am very good at what I do.
THx-RNMarsh
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I read that also and there seems to be a lot of truth to it. True for me. Being responsible to be on budget and on time and a lot to get done with and thru many types of people in a matrix organization from scratch to up and running successful technical project isn't for the weak of heart. Not everyone liked working with me.... except the ones who do the ranking, give promotions and pay raises.
THx-RNMarsh
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Air accidents are very seldom the result of a single problem. There's so much redundancy and crew attention, almost any single error can be survived. But when yoiu get two problems, your survival rate drops dramatically. Three concurrent errors, start praying.
Look it up. Although there are a few exceptions, almost all accidents are the result of at least two concurrent issues.
Jan
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Everyone is on a scale of psychopath. There are just as many dumb ones that range around where big CEOs do, but they often end up in jail because they're stupid. Them and their often smaller heads... just can't figure out how to be smart enough to work around not having empathy.
Penny pushers, always fighting spare part purchasing and storage.
The last place my father worked at, well, two plants you might say, did just that. They didn't lose lives over it but... When you have $800 for one, and $1600 for the other a minute cost of downtime, why on earth wouldn't you stock up common parts? Even when you have the part on hand, it can take hours to get everything going again. Don't have it? You charter a jet to bring it in, or, if you're foolish, overnight Fedex it to you're rural location. Either way 24+ hours costs you $20k-40k for a part that might be $400.
I hope the airline industry has outlawed problems like that. I do know they are much more strict on keeping track of parts and fly time.
Airline spare parts is a minefield in itself as you have to have the (accredited) spares at the right airport at the right time. This is a non-trivial problem to solve.
With regards to lean/JIT its like 6-sigma. Implemented correctly by people who understand it's great. Done wrong its just a way of pushing held capital onto the supplier. Worked in Japan as the suppliers were generally family members. Apple have it right in one way as they pre-buy a years worth of production from the supplier.
And don't get me started on misapplication of 'Agile'...
With regards to lean/JIT its like 6-sigma. Implemented correctly by people who understand it's great. Done wrong its just a way of pushing held capital onto the supplier. Worked in Japan as the suppliers were generally family members. Apple have it right in one way as they pre-buy a years worth of production from the supplier.
And don't get me started on misapplication of 'Agile'...
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