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by noego 2626 days ago
Your post reads like one of those classic "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" slogans. Sure, but guns make it a whole lot easier. No one is innocent here - there's plenty of blame to go around.

One of the key skills in being a senior engineer, is knowing how to communicate clearly with managers and decision-makers who don't have the same level of technical knowledge that you do. Communication is an extremely imperfect and lossy medium - figuring out how to get the most salient message across clearly, is a hard-to-master but vital skill. This article shows exactly why.
3 comments
TeMPOraL 2626 days ago
No; what the article is doing is equivalent to blaming the whole World War II on MP 40 machine pistols. Sure, that SMG killed a lot of people, but it's not the only gun that killed people, it's not the gun that started the war, and it had almost nothing to do with the causes and the course of the conflict.

A PowerPoint presentation did not kill the astronauts. Hell, judging by the full slide deck (elsewhere in the comments), the presentation wasn't even that bad - it was detached, the way scientific papers are detached. Could it be better? Yes. Should it be blamed for this? Not really.

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peteradio 2626 days ago
I gotta wonder what business a manager has being in a decision making position if they can't understand the summarized technicals of those below.
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protomyth 2626 days ago
Guns don't kill people. People make very specific decisions that lead to someone's death. I find any argument that blames a tool for someone's death to be suspect when a person or in this case a group of people met and discussed the issue. This wasn't a broken tool that directly lead to the deaths. This is especially problematic given NASA's history with Challenger, previous strikes, and the excellent writing of Richard Feynman on this very subject for this very organization.

A manager, or really anyone who desires to lead, needs to be able to remove the confusion surrounding information. If someone was deliberately not giving information then that another problem, but the slide had the critical phrase at the bottom showing this was way outside the test parameters (600x with some basic math).

I don't deny that the slide was bad and the engineers who put it together failed their profession, but the person at the top needs to be able to get by this.

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